On May 13, the EU Council adopted and published Decision 2025/904, which introduced two important changes.
This Decision introduced a new criterion for sanctions.
The EU Council added a completely new criterion for the introduction of personal sanctions - now individuals, legal entities, organizations or authorities that participated in transactions or provided the possibility of transactions for the transfer of property, control or economic benefits from entrepreneurs on the sanctions list according to the criterion of belonging to "leading businessmen."
It is important that we are talking about such a transfer that "undermines" the essence of restrictive measures. Based on paragraph 4 of the preamble of the decision, the EU Council speaks of a situation where leading businessmen who have fallen under sanctions make the transfer of business or control over it visible and formal, while actually maintaining the control of the sanctioned person over the business.
The EU Council also added a new norm that increases the amount of evidence for persons who have fallen under EU sanctions according to the criterion for "leading businessmen."
The EU decided by default not to trust statements about the sale of assets from February 24, 2022 - now, in the event of such an argument when challenging the sanctions, sanctioned persons will need to provide "sufficient, timely and reliable information" that ownership or control over assets is indeed lost.
The EU Court in various cases challenging sanctions has repeatedly referred to the fact that it is the EU Council that has the obligation to prove that the sanctioned person meets the criteria for sanctions. Now it turns out that the EU Council can add a person to the sanctions list according to the criterion of "leading businessman," and such a person bears the burden of proving that he has actually ceased to comply with it.