In covering our new report on companies’ operations in Russia in 2024, The Times highlighted Sir Rocco Forte, the veteran hotelier who kept his luxury hotels in St. Petersburg running after the 2022 invasion.
Rocco Forte Hotels has an investment in two hotels: the Astoria and the Angleterre. The latest filings show that they produced a pre-tax profit of £900,000 for the London-based group in the last financial year, bringing total profits from its Russian hotels since the war began in 2022 to £2.2 million, research by The Times found.
Sir Rocco said selling the Russian hotels “would be very counterproductive”. “We have fully complied with all the sanction rules,” he said.
Rocco Forte Hotels’ choice to keep doing business in Russia is a shameful example of greed triumphing over morality.
By staying, Rocco Forte Hotels indirectly helps bankroll Putin’s slaughter, paying into the same treasury that funds the missiles and bombs that have razed Ukrainian cities and unleashed the biggest refugee crisis in Europe since WW2.
The British government’s silence on this is indefensible. It is long past time to make clear that profiting from Russia’s war economy is unacceptable.
Scotland showed leadership in 2022 by calling on its businesses to cut all ties with Russia immediately. Westminster must do the same, naming and shaming those who refuse, and demanding that Rocco Forte, AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline and every other UK-linked company get out of Russia now and stop enabling its war machine.