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Roman Abramovich secretly bankrolled Dutch football club, leaked documents suggest

Roman Abramovich secretly funded the takeover of a Dutch top division football club and bankrolled it for years during the period that he also owned Chelsea, leaked documents appear to show.

Two investigations by the Netherlands football association were unable to uncover any financial ties between Abramovich and the club, Vitesse Arnhem, and concluded that the Russian oligarch had no managerial influence on Vitesse. Both Vitesse under its then owners, and Chelsea under Abramovich, repeatedly denied the oligarch was involved in funding the Dutch club.

The financial information has come to light in the Oligarch files, a cache of leaked data originating from the Cyprus-based offshore service provider MeritServus. The documents, reviewed by the Guardian and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, appear to reveal for the first time at least €117m (£102.8m) in secret funding from Abramovich for the Vitesse takeover, which flowed through a series of entities registered in opaque offshore tax havens.

Links to Chelsea were suspected at the time of the 2010 takeover, which was led by the Georgian former footballer Merab Jordania. While he described Abramovich as his friend at the inaugural press conference, Jordania denied the oligarch was involved.

The Royal Netherlands Football Association (KNVB) launched a first investigation into the financing of the takeover but found nothing to conflict with its rules.

Suspicions of links continued after Jordania’s takeover, as Chelsea used Vitesse – which plays in the Dutch Eredivisie – as a partner club, to which players not yet ready for the demands of the English Premier League could be loaned and gain competitive experience. Many Chelsea players went to Vitesse on loan throughout the

Read more on theguardian.com