Yes, the City needs new global clients – but should they include Putin’s pal?

In connection with the receding possibility of a London Stock Exchange listing for Saudi Aramco, I wrote that the City authorities’ apparent eagerness to accommodate companies ‘from places not best known for their accounting standards, business probity or general attachment to democracy and the rule of law’ smacked of Brexit-driven desperation. Russia was one of the places I had in mind. Now along comes a listing candidate that rings more alarm bells than the secretive Saudi oil giant.

The company concerned is called EN+ Group, and it is the first Russian entity to come to the London market since Russia’s aggression in Ukraine and Crimea provoked US and EU sanctions in 2014. EN+’s business is ‘energy and aluminium’; its controlling shareholder is Oleg Deripaska, the Russian billionaire often described as a member of Vladimir Putin’s inner circle and best known in the UK for entertaining George Osborne and Peter Mandelson on his yacht in Corfu in 2008.