A Rabbi who helped Roman Abramovich prove his Sephardi ancestry has been told he cannot leave the country in order to help an investigation into the Russian's acquisition of Portuguese citizenship.
Rabbi Daniel Litvak was arrested late last week as he attempted to leave Porto for Israel. Mr Litvak has previously defended the assessment of Abramovich's genealogy despite it being incredibly uncommon for Russian Jews to have Sephardi backgrounds.
Portuguese police said on Friday that the investigation was focusing on allegations of money laundering, corruption, fraud and falsification of documents in the process of granting citizenship to descendants of Sephardic Jews.
The Jewish community in Porto has refuted the allegations of fraud and said that they had been unfairly smeared.
