Mr Shvidler made his £1.5 billion fortune during the privatisation of Russian industry and is said to maintain a close connection to Mr Abramovich. In 2008, the pair reportedly bought three houses in Snowmass Village, Colorado, for nearly £50 million.
The seized £10 million jet, a Bombardier Global Express, is registered in Luxembourg, apparently to a company called Global Jet Luxembourg. Sources said that establishing the true owner was complicated – and made more so by Mr Shvidler’s residency, as a dual US-Russian citizen.
The Department for Transport was alerted soon after its landing at Farnborough Airport on Friday morning. It filed a flight plan on Monday and was due to depart on Tuesday, according to government sources.
In the early hours of Tuesday morning, the Transport Secretary ordered its foreign carrier permit be revoked, meaning that the jet could no longer leave the UK carrying passengers. It would have meant that Mr Shvidler was unable to leave the UK on his jet and would have to find alternative means to depart.
He followed it up with a new restriction of flying order, effectively preventing it from leaving, and giving officials more time to ensure that the jet was not in breach of the original restriction of flying order or new aviation sanctions laid on Tuesday night.
‘Jet may well be able to leave on Wednesday’
A source said: “The jet may well be able to leave on Wednesday once it has proved its owners are not Russian. However, the Transport Secretary has taken this action to demonstrate that we will look closely at all jets landing in the UK to ensure our sanctions are being followed, and to frustrate those close to the [Vladimir] Putin regime.”
Mr Abramovich’s jet is understood to have flown out of Stansted Airport for Basel, Switzerland, after Aeroflot was banned from UK airspace and before all Russian-connected aircraft was barred.
Meanwhile, a superyacht linked to the Chelsea owner left Barcelona on Tuesday where it had been undergoing repairs in a shipyard, according to ship-tracking data.
The 140m (460ft) Solaris, which sails under a Bermuda flag according to monitoring site Marine Traffic, left Spanish company MB92’s Barcelona shipyard just after 5pm (4pm GMT) on Tuesday. MB92 declined to comment.
