Geoffrey Cox, who served as Attorney General under both Theresa May and Boris Johnson, was paid £93,000 to provide legal services to a firm whose shareholders include two Russians sanctioned over the invasion of Ukraine.
Cox, a serving Conservative MP, logged 62 hours of work for ABH Holdings S.A. – a Luxembourg-based banking and financial services holding company – in the UK parliament’s Register of Members’ Financial Interests, Politico reported. Among the firm’s shareholders are Mikhail Fridman, one of Russia’s wealthiest businessmen, and Petr Aven, who served as Russia’s Minister of Foreign Economic Relations in the 1990s. Both were sanctioned by the UK in March 2022, with their stakes in ABH Holdings and their ties to Alfa Group – one of Russia’s largest private banking conglomerates – cited as grounds for the designation.
A Sanctioned Firm, A Sitting MP
The UK government classified ABH Holdings as operating in a sector of strategic significance to the Russian state at the time the sanctions were imposed. The company’s ties to Alfa Group — a financial empire that made Fridman one of Russia’s richest men before the war — were central to the sanctions reasoning.
Fridman and Aven did secure a partial legal victory in April 2024, when the EU’s General Court ruled that the bloc had not adequately justified imposing sanctions on them for the period between February 2022 and mid-March 2023. The ruling, however, did not lift their designations — both men remain under EU and UK restrictive measures to this day.
Cox’s parliamentary declaration gives no detail on what legal advice he provided or whether his work is connected to Fridman’s investor-state dispute settlement case against the UK government. ISDS is an arbitration mechanism that allows foreign investors to sue host countries over regulations or decisions that harm their business interests — and Fridman has used it extensively. He filed a €16 billion claim against Luxembourg in response to sanctions on his assets there and has brought multiple separate cases against Ukraine. His ISDS case against the UK was acknowledged by Foreign Office minister Chris Bryant in November 2025, though its specifics remain undisclosed.
Neither Cox nor ABH Holdings responded to requests for comment. There is no suggestion of wrongdoing — the firm is entitled to legal representation.
The MP Who Sues The State He Serves
The situation points to a structural tension that Cox has navigated for years. He is an experienced arbitration barrister who is simultaneously a sitting legislator and, at present, a party to legal action against the very government he serves in parliament. Alongside the ABH Holdings work, Cox is representing investors in a separate ISDS claim against the UK over a cancelled coal mine project in Cumbria — one of only two known uses of the mechanism against the UK since 2006.
The parliament’s Register of Members’ Financial Interests, where Cox disclosed the ABH Holdings work, is designed to ensure transparency — but it does not require MPs to disclose the substance of the advice they provide. Readers of Cox’s entry know he was paid and for how long. They do not know what he said.
Not The First Time
Cox has drawn scrutiny over outside legal work before. In 2021 it emerged that he had spent an entire month in the Caribbean representing the British Virgin Islands government in a corruption case brought by the UK’s own Foreign Office — while simultaneously casting votes in the House of Commons remotely. The episode renewed a long-running debate about whether MPs should be permitted to maintain high-earning legal practices alongside their parliamentary duties.
The latest disclosures are unlikely to settle that debate.