Lawyers and Chelsea fans are among the few who would lose out if they left

STAMFORD BRIDGE, home to Chelsea football club, is hardly a slum. But it has fallen behind the glitzy new stadiums of its nearest rivals in England’s Premier League. And that is how things are likely to remain, for on May 31st Chelsea announced that it had shelved a £1bn ($1.3bn) scheme to redevelop its west London stadium. The club’s billionaire owner, Roman Abramovich, has not had his British visa renewed; this, it seems, was his response. The club pointedly cited the “current unfavourable investment climate” for its decision.

Mr Abramovich appears to be a casualty of Britain’s deteriorating relationship with Russia, which has worsened since the poisoning of Sergei Skripal, a former GRU agent, in March. As Britain’s most famous oligarch, Mr Abramovich was an obvious target for the government to demonstrate a tougher attitude to those with ties to Russia’s president. He has since acquired citizenship of Israel, and is reportedly planning to move there. Many Londoners wonder what would happen if more rich Russians were to follow suit.

There are around 65,000 Russians in Britain, mostly in the capital. Only a small percentage are very rich, says Katia Nikitina, the publisher of Zima, a magazine for Russians in London. Last year 48 Russians came to Britain on Tier 1 visas, which allow holders and their families to stay for three years and four months if they invest £2m in government bonds or companies. Only the Chinese were more numerous.

But the number of visas has dropped sharply since the minimum investment sum was raised and money-laundering checks tightened in 2015. In the eight years before that—which Transparency International, an anti-corruption watchdog, calls the “blind faith” period—705 Russians arrived, making up 23% of the total. According to TI, Russians have invested more than £700m under the scheme.

Some of those with most to lose from a Russian exodus may be lawyers. Oligarchs’ big deals and bigger personal bust-ups have brought in business over the years for home-grown law firms and the London offices of American ones. Last month Linklaters was ticked off by MPs for its work on deals involving Russian companies, after it refused to answer questions about the flotation of En+, a holding company for Oleg Deripaska, a businessman under American sanctions. Figures from Dealogic, a data provider, show that Britain’s “Magic Circle” of law firms have advised on 25 listings of Russian companies on London’s exchanges in the past two decades, a tenth of the total listings they oversaw.

London lawyers have also helped oligarchs embroiled in litigation. Russian litigants accounted for a tenth of cases heard in the London Commercial Courts between March 2017 and April 2018. Six years ago Mr Abramovich was unsuccessfully sued by a fellow oligarch, Boris Berezovsky, for breach of contract. Fees were estimated to have come to £100m.

Yet the high profile of London’s high-rolling Russians belies the relatively small role that their money plays in the wider economy. Foreigners hold roughly £10trn of British assets. Russia’s share of that is just 0.25%, a smaller proportion than that of Finland and South Korea.

Parts of west London have acquired many new Russian residents, and shops to serve them (including an outfitter of armoured luxury cars). Yet even in “prime” London—that is, the top 5-10% of the market—buyers from eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union account for only around 5% of sales, according to data from Savills, a property firm. Outside the capital’s swankiest districts, Russians’ influence is minuscule. The departure of oligarchs might affect prices on some streets in Kensington, but not beyond.

The same is true of Britain’s private schools. Some have done well out of Russian parents. But of the 53,678 foreign pupils who attend schools that belong to the Independent Schools Council, only 2,806 are Russian. China, by contrast, sends 9,008 pupils from its mainland, and a further 5,188 from Hong Kong.

In all, if more oligarchs like Mr Abramovich decide to leave, the impact might be less than widely thought—at least outside Chelsea.

Correction (June 20th, 2018): A previous version of this piece said that Sergei Skripal, poisoned in Salisbury in March, was a “former KGB agent”. In fact, he worked for Russian military intelligence, the GRU.