Russia president Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has resulted in punishment from around the world in terms of Russia’s participation in sports, recently the IIHF banning the country from its events and pulling the 2023 world junior championships out of the country.
But a recent report from the New York Post suggests that Putin had a hand in a major changes to professional sports years ago.
Per the Post, Putin pressured Russian billionaire and former Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov, who bought the team in 2010, to sell the team back in 2019, but pressure to make the sale went back as much as five years before that, when Russia was facing sanctions from the US for taking over Crimea.
In the report, the Post says that Putin applies such tactics to ensure that Russians with assets in the West will show their loyalty to him. Prokhorov refusing to sell the team could have meant him losing assets back in Russia.
A spokesman for Prokhorov denied this report, saying he was not pressured by anybody to sell the team.
Prokhorov sold the Nets to Joe Tsai for $3.3 billion, including a $1 billion sale of the Barclays Center. The sale of the team at $2.35 billion is still the largest amount ever paid for a sports team. It could have all started with pressure overseas from Putin onto Prokhorov, who is worth nearly $12 billion, per Forbes, and according to the Post, now spends most of his time in France.
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