A U.S. trust linked to sanctioned Russian senator and billionaire Suleiman Kerimov held a 1% stake in Elon Musk’s SpaceX before authorities blocked the trust, Bloomberg reported Wednesday, citing anonymous sources familiar with the matter.
Delaware-based Heritage Trust reportedly acquired the SpaceX stake in 2017, a year before the Trump administration’s Treasury Department sanctioned Kerimov along with dozens of other Kremlin-linked oligarchs.
Heritage Trust later “disposed of” its SpaceX holding before the U.S. Treasury blocked the trust in June 2022. The Biden administration argued that Kerimov had retained an obscured interest in Heritage Trust and continued to invest in unidentified “large” public and private U.S. companies.
Defense contractors with security clearance, such as SpaceX, are required to report any foreign ownership, control or influence of at least 5%.
It was not immediately clear whether SpaceX was aware that Heritage Trust or any associated entities held the stake.
Bloomberg noted that the case underscores “the hurdles that tangled financial networks present to U.S. attempts to uphold sanctions and the challenges closely held companies such as SpaceX… must confront in order to determine the identity of investors.”
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