Can Australians Work for Sanctioned Oligarchs? Deripaska v Minister for Foreign Affairs (2026) 100 ALJR 650
Anton Moiseienko
14.8.2026
In common with other democratic nations, Australia has used targeted financial sanctions against thousands of ‘undesirables’. They include suspected terrorists, nuclear proliferators, foreign dictators and – since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 – many of the members of the Kremlin’s elite.
In May 2026, the High Court of Australia dealt with the Australian autonomous sanctions regime for the first time in Deripaska v Minister for Foreign Affairs (2026) 100 ALJR 650 (Deripaska). The judgments delivered in that case contain interesting observations about the reach of Australian sanctions, and all lawyers and compliance professionals would do well to take note.
Australian Financial Sanctions
It is useful to begin by reviewing the basics. In common with all UN member states, Australia implements sanctions imposed by the UN Security Council under the Charter of the United Nations Act 1945 (Cth). It also puts in place its own sanctions under the Autonomous Sanctions Act 2011 (Cth) and Autonomous Sanctions Regulations 2011 (Cth) (Sanctions Regulations).
Under reg 15 of the Sanctions Regulations, if an Australian company, citizen, or anyone within Australia’s territory holds assets for a sanctioned person, they must notify the Australian Federal Police (AFP) of such assets and must not dispose of them. This amounts to the ‘freezing’ of any property that sanctioned persons own in Australia. Furthermore, reg 14 of the Sanctions Regulations provides that no one in Australia must make any assets available to a sanctioned person, directly or indirectly.
These prohibitions are broad but not limitless. Of particular note, Australian laws do not prohibit receiving assets from sanctioned persons. So, for instance, the Australian Sanctions Office states (correctly) that it would be lawful for Australians to receive pension payments from sanctioned foreign banks. Whether this limitation makes sense depends on whether one conceptualises sanctions primarily as a means of depriving sanctioned persons of revenue or that of ensuring their complete isolation from legitimate commerce.
Nor is it illegal to provide services, as distinct from assets, to sanctioned persons – unless they fall within the ambit of ‘sanctioned services’, such as (for example) the maintenance of the oil infrastructure in North Korea. This is a more difficult limitation to justify. Combined with the absence of a prohibition on the receipt of payments from sanctioned persons, this limitation opens up the uncomfortable possibility of Australians lawfully working for sanctioned persons. One high-profile situation that brought these issues to the surface is the Australian tennis player Thanasi Kokkinakis’s participation in an exhibition tournament held in St Petersburg and sponsored by the Australia-sanctioned company Gazprom in 2024.
As will become apparent, this context is important for understanding Deripaska.
The Sanctions against Deripaska
Oleg Deripaska is a prime example of the fabulously wealthy and politically well-connected Russian businessmen often described as ‘oligarchs’. He was once the richest person in Russia, worth US$28 billion. He remains a billionaire. On 17 March 2022, the Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs (the Minister) imposed targeted financial sanctions and a travel ban on Deripaska under the Sanctions Regulations.
The main source of Deripaska’s wealth is his ownership of Rusal, one of the world’s largest producers of aluminium. Because of Rusal’s global business operations, Western sanctions against Deripaska – imposed in the aftermath of Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine in early 2014 – have had ramifications around the world. For example, in 2019 Deripaska divested a portion of his shares in Rusal so that the company could continue operations in the United States of America (US), being no longer controlled by a US-sanctioned person.
In Australia, sanctions against Deripaska first gave rise to a civil case in the Federal Court of Australia, Alumina and Bauxite Co Ltd v Queensland Alumina Ltd [2024] FCA 43 (Alumina). The dispute involved a joint venture between Rusal and the Rio Tinto Group. Once Australia sanctioned Deripaska, the joint venture company refused to supply alumina to a Rusal subsidiary in which Deripaska held a minority stake (25.58%) on the basis that doing so would involve making assets indirectly available to Deripaska. Justice O’Bryan agreed, finding that, even with Deripaska only being a minority shareholder, making supplies to Queensland Alumina Ltd would indirectly benefit him and therefore involve a violation of Australian sanctions.
This helps explain why Deripaska brought a judicial review challenge to his designation in Australia. (One might note, as a piece of legal trivia, that he was represented by the former federal Attorney-General Christian Porter.) As is typical in sanctions challenges, Deripaska argued that the was wrong to decide that he satisfied the relevant designation criterion of ‘engaging in an activity or performing a function that is of economic or strategic significance to Russia’. This argument failed before both the primary judge (Deripaska v Minister for Foreign Affairs [2024] FCA 62 (Deripaska FC)) and the Full Court of the Federal Court of Australia (Deripaska v Minister for Foreign Affairs (2025) 308 FCR 175).
Concurrently, Deripaska’s team ran a constitutional argument. This is the one that eventually made its way to the High Court. The essence of the argument was that, in the absence of an individual permit granted by the Minister under reg 18 of the Sanctions Regulations, Australian sanctions impermissibly preclude the sanctioned person from obtaining legal representation, including in order to seek advice on or challenge the constitutionality of the sanctions against them.
As put by the primary judge, and accepted by three of the High Court judges (Gageler CJ, Gleeson and Jagot JJ) at [15]:
Before this Court, as before the Federal Court, it has remained common ground between the parties that, absent [the Minister’s] permit under reg 18, regs 14 [the prohibition of making assets available to a sanctioned person] and 15 [the prohibition on disposal of controlled assets] would have the practical operation of denying a designated person access to legal representation unless regs 14 and 15 can and must be read and construed in accordance with s 15A of the Acts Interpretation Act [1901 (Cth)] and s 13 of the Legislation Act [2003 (Cth)] to have a narrower practical operation. The primary judge distilled the essential difficulties [Deripaska FC at [41]]:
‘First, a designated person or entity is prevented from remunerating an Australian lawyer who works for them. Secondly, it will very likely be impossible for a lawyer effectively to advise or represent a designated person or entity without dealing with 'controlled assets' (which include legal documents or instruments belonging to the person or entity, including documents brought into existence by the lawyer on the client's instructions). Thirdly, any 'asset' in the lawyer's possession, including intellectual property (and likely including the lawyer's own notes) would not be able to be made available 'to, or for the benefit of' a designated person or entity who was the lawyer's client.’
The other judges did not state that it was categorically impossible for a sanctioned person to lawfully retain a lawyer in Australia but accepted it was ‘unlikely’ that they would be able to do so without a ministerial permit (Gordon and Steward JJ at [43]; Edelman J at [111]; Beech-Jones J at [178]).
Ultimately, despite subtle differences in reasoning, all judges accepted that the operation of Australian sanctions laws should be read down to avoid such an outcome. (In Deripaska’s case, an individual permit had been duly granted by the Minister in any event.) Therefore, Deripaska’s challenge to the constitutionality of the Sanctions Regulations failed. This outcome is as sound as it is predictable: it would strain one’s imagination to envisage the High Court striking down, on this basis, the legal regime based upon which the Australian government has sanctioned thousands of individuals and companies from all over the world, not only Russia. Such an outcome would have imperilled Australian sanctions coordination with other like-minded countries and led to the release of millions in frozen assets.
The Implications of the Judgment
The most notable implication of the four judgments in Deripaska lies in their observations on the breadth of Australian sanctions laws. Recall that, as discussed at the outset, Australian sanctions do not prohibit the receipt of payments from sanctioned persons; nor the provision of services to them. Yet the entire case before the High Court was predicated precisely on the supposed inability of sanctioned persons to retain Australian lawyers!
As evident from the paragraph cited above, three considerations were proffered in support of this conclusion.
First, it was accepted by the Federal Court and High Court alike that ‘a designated person or entity is prevented from remunerating an Australian lawyer who works for them’. Offered without any explanation, this observation mystifies me since it plainly contradicts both the Regulations and the Australian Sanctions Office’s guidance cited above. My best guess is that the judges accepted that the sanctioned person was prevented from remunerating the lawyer as a practical matter, likely because any Australian bank would freeze the incoming payment from a sanctioned person rather than enable it to be credited to their lawyer’s account. Indeed, the primary judge noted that the effects of sanctions were ‘carefully explained in the submissions’, and he only cited them in brief (Deripaska FC at [41]).
Second, the courts took the view that the provision of legal services to a sanctioned person would inevitably involve dealing with assets owned or controlled by such persons, including ‘documents brought into existence by the lawyer on the client's instructions’. This reasoning must extend to the provision of virtually any services for the benefit of a sanctioned person, not only legal advice.
Third, no assets brought about by the lawyer’s work must be made available to the sanctioned person, directly or indirectly. This, again, is an interpretation that effectively kills the ability to provide any services whatsoever to a sanctioned person, unless one can think of a service that does not result in the generation of any tangible or intangible assets.
This broad interpretation of Australian sanctions laws effectively obliterates any scope for the provision of services, paid or unpaid, to sanctioned persons. It means that sanctions compliance needs to be considered in a wider range of situations than one might have assumed if one simply took regs 14 and 15 of the Sanctions Regulations at face value.
Unexpected Situations
Curiously enough, another recent set of circumstances that can serve as an illustration of the breadth of these provisions relates to sport (again).
As I write this, the Russian female water polo team is competing at the World Cup competition in Sydney. The head of the Russian Aquatics Federation is the Australia-sanctioned Russian businessman Dmitry Mazepin, and press reporting suggests that the team are sponsored by the Australia-sanctioned company Surgutneftegas, whose Director General, Vladimir Bogdanov, is also Australia-sanctioned.
Australian sanctions laws extend to anyone within Australia’s territory, and ‘assets’ include any tangible or intangible property under s 4 of the Autonomous Sanctions Act 2011 (Cth). Therefore, these visitors are also bound by the prohibitions on using assets that might be owned or controlled by sanctioned persons – such as sporting equipment provided to the team – or making assets directly or indirectly available to such persons, including by supplying them with any documents or footage related to the competition.
Without suggesting that those prohibitions have been or will be breached, these sanctions considerations need to be studied carefully in situations such as these, as I explained recently to The Sydney Morning Herald.
Aggressive Laws, Meek Enforcement
On a macro-level, Australian courts have evinced a clear tendency to interpret sanctions laws broadly. In Deripaska, this may have been partly a reflection of litigation tactics: ironically, Deripaska’s lawyers had to argue for an aggressive interpretation of applicable sanctions restrictions to lend force to their constitutional argument. But, as discussed previously, the Federal Court had adopted a similarly expansive approach in Alumina.
The resulting breadth of Australian sanctions should not be conflated with their actual enforcement. In an ongoing parliamentary inquiry into the effectiveness of sanctions against Russia, the Australian government repeatedly sidestepped questions about the number of full-time staff dedicated to sanctions evasion investigations in the AFP.
Unlike all comparable jurisdictions, including Canada, the United Kingdom and the US, in the four years since the introduction of massive sanctions against Russia, Australia has not seen a single Russia sanctions evasion prosecution.
However, in June 2026, for the first time, the Australian Border Force, the AFP and the New Zealand Police carried out coordinated searches in Melbourne and Christchurch in connection with an investigation into the potential evasion of Russia sanctions – based on a referral from the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
So, the High Court’s judgment in Deripaska is both remarkable and indicative of the growing gulf between Australia’s aggressive sanctions laws and meek enforcement.
Anton Moiseienkois an Associate Professor of Law at the Australian National University Law School, specialising in financial crime and economic sanctions.
Suggested citation: Anton Moiseienko, ‘Can Australians Work for Sanctioned Oligarchs? Deripaska v Minister for Foreign Affairs (2026) 100 ALJR 650’ (14 August 2026) <https://www.auspublaw.org/blog/2026/8/can-australians-work-for-sanctioned-oligarchs-deripaska-v-minister-for-foreign-affairs-2026-100-aljr-650>