Abramovich once sold a significant part of his oil business, concentrated in the company Sibneft, to Gazprom, Zenit's owner, but it's a long time ago now. Other than that, he doesn't have any particular links with the club. Zenit is owned by Gazprom, in which the majority stake is owned by the Russian state, and Abramovich is said to have a reasonably close personal relationship with Putin. That's all. At one point, Abramovich was rumoured to be the de facto owner of CSKA Moscow, but I've not heard that for a long time, either.
As for CFG buying a minority stake in Spartak, this rumour cropped up around 4 weeks ago, as I posted in post 636 of this thread devoted to CFG: https://forums.bluemoon-mcfc.co.uk/...re-projects-p-54.343366/page-64#post-14325246. At that point, the Russian sports press reported that we were dissatisfied with the results of legal due diligence and had pulled out of the proposed deal (see post 653 on page 66 of that thread, which is currently the last post in the thread).
The only source that's currently suggesting things have changed, as far as I can see, is this one: https://www.sports.ru/football/1103...z-raboty-akademii-spartaka-ego-provodit-.html. The sports.ru website is a reasonably reliable source (the reference to 'Championat' is to another site from their stable, I think, though I can't actually see a further story on there). The sport.ru piece that I've linked to, which they published on Saturday, reads as follows (my translation, and I can't be arsed with the tags):
Ashworth seems to have spent his entire post-playing career in the former Soviet Union and in Nigeria as, variously, a coach and technical director: Paul Ashworth - Wikipedia. I assume he's been hired as a freelance consultant by CFG for this particular project owing to his local expertise rather than joined as a permanent addition, but I suppose you never know.