‘At the height of Berezovsky’s influence, when his name came up in people’s office’s in Moscow - including in or near the Kremlin - my hosts would sometimes point to the walls and start whispering or even, in a couple of cases, scribbling notes to me. This was a practice I had not seen since the Brezhnev era in furtive encounters with dissident intellectuals’
- STROBE TALBOTT, former US Deputy Secretary of State, 1993-20001
IN HIS GILDED CAGE in London and the Home Counties, Boris Berezovsky could have settled for a quiet life, indulging in the sybaritic and hedonistic lifestyle of a retired tycoon. But he could not resist his favourite drug - political intrigue - for this was a man who listed his hobbies in Russia’s equivalent of Who’s Who as ‘work and power’. And so, from the security of his fortified Mayfair office, surrounded by hidden cameras, the oligarch set out to plot a new Russian revolution. His modern-day Tsar Nicholas was former President and now Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
By 2001, Berezovsky’s finances were secure and, like Napoleon on Elba, he began plotting, turning himself into Putin’s most bitter opponent, dedicating his days in exile to removing the Russian President from office. Most of his energies and fortune became devoted to one cause: blackening Putin’s name in the West and destabilizing him in his own country.
Even by tycoon standards, Berezovsky is a demanding and eccentric individual. A short, wiry, if slightly stooping figure, he has drooping eyelids and an intense stare. It is a demeanour that disguises an intense intelligence, fertile curiosity, and analytical mind. ‘He is chaotic, destructive, brilliant, impatient, and sometimes impossible,’ said one source who worked closely with him in his London office. ‘His brain is always in 100 per cent overdrive. He cannot finish a sentence before changing his mind or the subject. He is constantly shouting and making outbursts. He is hyper all the time and like a child with attention deficiency syndrome. But he can also be suave and turn the charm on and off whenever it is expedient.’
Sitting at his desk, the fugitive oligarch is often in a world of his own, lost in thought. Then, unexpectedly, he will launch into a burst of hyperactivity: jamming his finger on the intercom button repeatedly and yelling in such fast, impenetrable Russian that he needs to repeat himself constantly. He lives on the telephone, often holding two mobiles and conducting two conversations at the same time.
Berezovsky is also a perfectionist. Every document that comes out of his office must be perfect in style and layout. He often seems more concerned about style than substance. ‘What is worse is that he is also a perfectionist about things that he knows nothing about,’ recalled a former business partner.
Additionally, he has an apparently high tolerance for alcohol. At his Surrey country house he likes a glass of St Emilion or Ornellaia ’95 served by a white-gloved English butler. At his Mayfair office he may indulge in something heavier: some Sasakeli, an expensive and very strong Italian wine. For most people, one glass would knock them out for the rest of the week, but Berezovsky could get through more than that and still remain sharp at his desk.
Berezovsky has made every effort to integrate into English society and has been unfailingly polite to his new hosts, but initially he found it difficult to break Russian habits. When his children first turned up at their private school near Cobham, Surrey, with a cavalcade of burly bodyguards, it raised eyebrows. After that incident, their Swiss nanny accompanied the children to school instead.
While Berezovsky has been devoted to his family and generous to his friends, he is extremely self-absorbed. Unlike most oligarchs, he is very conscious of his looks, spending a fortune on clothes. He wears black silk shirts, bespoke suits, rarely wears a tie, and loves shopping on Sloane Street and New Bond Street, where his favourite fashion designer is ‘Black Zhenya’.
No longer the Machiavellian Kremlin insider, instead now isolated from Russia, Berezovsky has become intensely concerned about his image and reputation. He regards himself as a major international political superstar and celebrity. ‘He would love to be an insider in the British establishment; nothing would excite him more,’ said a former aide. ‘That’s why the other people at private dinner parties he attends are very important to him.’ He loves to be the centre of attention, sees himself as a high-calibre VIP, and has a thirst for newspaper column inches.
Despite his relatively poor English, Berezovsky has shown an insatiable appetite for delivering speeches, campaigning, and talking to the press. Often turning in an eighteen-hour day, he would spend up to 80 per cent of his time on media and propaganda activities. Every newspaper and magazine article was cut out and put into scrapbooks in his office. By 2008, he had assembled a three-volume, 1,800-page compilation of press cuttings and transcripts of interviews he had given since the 1990s. He called it The Art of the Impossible. As well as power, the two things that Berezovsky has craved more than anything in his remarkable life are attention and publicity. For him, the media has been his personal channel to political power and the governing institutions.
A highly contentious figure, Berezovsky was regarded as just another shadowy Russian businessman when he first arrived in London in 2001. To succeed in destabilizing and discrediting Putin, he first needed to transform himself into a credible political figure. He may have mesmerized the Yeltsin government for a while when he operated like a cross between Lenin and Mephistopheles, but could he perform the same magic on the British establishment?
He soon came to realize that spending time with aristocratic companions provided little more than introductions to other aristocrats and invitations to prestigious parties and was not the conduit to opinion formers he was seeking. Instead, Berezovsky turned to the PR industry - a key route to influence in Britain during the Blair government. More secretive oligarchs such as Oleg Deripaska retained City PR firms like Finsbury and Financial Dynamics, but for damage limitation rather than in order to give out a positive message. Most Russian businessmen regard the media with disdain. Roman Abramovich once told Le Monde that the difference between a rat and a hamster was public relations. Abramovich’s affable spin doctor John Mann, an articulate American living in Moscow, is renowned for saying as little as possible on behalf of his client, even protesting that his boss is not a public figure and is entitled to his privacy.
Berezovsky, however, sees the role of the press very differently. He regards it as a crucial political weapon and relishes the attendant limelight. On his own admission he is a media manipulator, ‘I use the mass media as a form of political leverage.’2
In the court of Tsar Boris, no one has been more important in transforming the fugitive oligarch from obscurity to prominence than Lord Bell, the PR guru who helped to mastermind Margaret Thatcher’s three general election victories. Appointing Lord Bell was one of Berezovsky’s shrewdest moves. A smooth operator, Bell has proved adept at representing foreign clients, notably the Saudi royal family and, more controversially, President Lukashenko of Belarus and the late President Pinochet of Chile.
Lord Bell first met Berezovsky in 1996 when he was parachuted into Russia to rescue President Yeltsin’s ailing re-election campaign. Working closely with business insiders and American spin doctors, he reinvented Yeltsin’s persona. Lord Bell is a master of the personal touch and has a soothing bedside manner. He is credited with transforming Yeltsin from a dour, aggressive, hard-line, mechanical politician into a smiling, accessible populist. Berezovsky was clearly impressed by the man who had honed his skills at the advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi in the 1970s and whose personal allure led one former colleague to comment, ‘He was so charming that dogs would cross the street just to be petted by him.’
Berezovsky was impressed by the spin doctor’s energy, charm, and guile, and even more so by the leading figures he had advised: Lady Thatcher while she was Prime Minister, Rupert Murdoch, his business hero, and former President F. W. de Klerk of South Africa. Optimistic, articulate, and well connected, the chain-smoking Lord Bell was also a power broker and Berezovsky hired him as much for his contacts book as for his PR skills. ‘Using Tim Bell is the communications equivalent of dialling 911,’ said one industry executive.
After leaving Saatchi & Saatchi, Bell moved into public relations. He specialized in advising accident-prone, high-profile figures - among them Lady Thatcher’s son Mark Thatcher; the coal industry boss Ian Macgregor during the 1984 miners’ strike; the BBC Director-General Lord Birt over allegations of tax avoidance; British Airways Chairman Lord King over claims of dirty tricks against Virgin Airlines; and David Mellor during the media firestorm that broke over his affair with the actress Antonia de Sancha in 1992. He was therefore tailor-made for Berezovsky, who has poured millions of pounds into commissioning anti-Putin advertisements, PR stunts, political lobbying, and promoting his personal message.
Since late 2001, most of his media profile has been facilitated by Bell’s company, Bell Pottinger, to whom Berezovsky pays a retainer of £25,000 per month plus expenses. These invoices - which run into hundreds of thousands of pounds - are always paid in full and on time, a measure of Lord Bell’s importance.
During their meetings at the oligarch’s Mayfair office, Lord Bell rarely disagreed with his client’s endless stream of ideas for propaganda, appearing to be as much an admirer as a mere advocate. He has his own take on his client. ‘The trouble with this world is that one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist,’ he has said. ‘There is some kind of dirty tricks campaign being waged against him [Berezovsky]. To attack him, physically intimidate him, and to mount media attacks on him at every level. And where he approaches authorities in other countries, he discovers that there is a file on record put there by the Russians questioning his integrity and financial and political status…I think Boris Berezovsky is a very important person because he believes more profoundly in democracy and in human rights than almost anyone I have come across.’3
Lord Bell has been responsible for ensuring that there is a place for Berezovsky at Britain’s top tables. As well as speaking at the Reform Club, Berezovsky has lectured at Chatham House, addressed Eton schoolboys, spoken at the Oxford University Russian Society (in 2004), and was once quizzed by a group of senior EU policy-makers. He has enjoyed favourable coverage in the Sunday Times - even penning several articles under his own byline - and been interviewed regularly by BBC2’s Newsnight. He took to calling impromptu press conferences, paying to hold them in the grand auditoriums of the Royal United Services Institute on Whitehall and at Chatham House in St James’s Square.
In June 2007 he was a panellist on BBC1’s Question Time, the only Russian so far to have appeared. His message was always the same: Putin was creating an authoritarian government, seizing the mass media, stifling opposition, and renationalizing privately owned companies. Unsurprisingly, Russian authorities questioned how a fugitive such as Berezovsky could gain access to such venerable British institutions and be afforded such a respectful reception.
As well as securing platforms from which to wage his highlevel campaign, money was also spent on lavish self-promotion and media stunts. Lord Bell was tasked with organizing a demonstration outside the Russian Embassy in Kensington Palace Gardens in October 2003 when fellow oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky was arrested, and in May 2004 he was further responsible for the presence of dozens of limousines that drove past the Russian Embassy bearing large signs accusing Putin of running a police state. ‘Free Khodorkovsky’, ‘Russian Business vs KGB’, and ‘Russian Business vs Police State’, some of them read, a clear indication of the strength of Berezovsky’s opposition.
Just before the 2004 Russian presidential election, Berezovsky commissioned a full-page advertisement - at a cost of some £250,000 - that appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Times, the Financial Times, and the Daily Telegraph. Headed ‘Seven Questions to President George Bush about his friend President Putin’, it accused Putin of genocide in Chechnya and of whipping up ‘militaristic hysteria similar to Germany under the early Nazi regime’. It urged Bush to ‘look into the eyes of your friend again’. Joining Berezovsky as signatories were several Soviet-era dissidents.
At the St Petersburg summit of G8 nations in July 2006, Bell Pottinger planned to place an advertisement on behalf of Berezovsky’s civil liberties foundation in the official programme. The advertisement contained a photograph of President Putin, who was chairing the summit, made up to look like Groucho Marx. It carried the comedian’s famous line: ‘I wouldn’t want to be a member of any club that would have me as a member.’ The organizers ordered its removal and it was never used. ‘What seemed to upset him [Putin] was the word “Marx”,’ Lord Bell remarked.4
Berezovsky rarely missed an opportunity to denounce his arch foe or plot his downfall. By now the two men had a deeprooted loathing for one another. Asked his views on Berezovsky by a journalist in 2002, Putin replied, ‘Who’s he?’ In September 2004 Berezovsky declared, ‘Putin is the terrorist number one…He is a war criminal making genocide.’5
Desperate to return to Russia, unseat Putin, and reverse his legacy became an obsession. According to Andrei Vassiliev, the editor of Kommersant, ‘He is not addicted to gambling or drugs, but to politics. He has fallen ill with politics.’6
Steadily, the vast outlays on security, public relations, and legal fees began to make inroads into Berezovsky’s personal fortune. By being forced to sell most of his assets, he also missed out on the post-2000 rise in oil and gas prices and the soaring Russian stock market. However, he remained the richest refugee in Britain. In 2008 he still had an estimated fortune of some £700 million.
It was inevitable that Putin would retaliate. Between 1999 and 2008, the Russian prosecutors filed a string of charges against the renegade billionaire for fraud and embezzlement. They issued one demand after another for the extradition of Berezovsky to Moscow to face trial, all the while adding to the charge sheet. The first of these arrived in March 2002.
Berezovsky’s effectiveness depended not just on the size of his war chest but also, crucially, on the British response towards his request for political asylum. In Britain, while asylum requests are considered in secret by immigration authorities and are ultimately decided on by the Home Secretary, extradition requests are reviewed in open court, independent of government. In most circumstances an extradition request is not heard if asylum has already been granted as the presumption is that the person would be in danger if sent back to his home country. In the case of extradition the presiding judge has to decide not on the guilt or innocence of the charge being levied by the requesting nation, but on whether the defendant can demonstrate that the request is politically motivated or if he or she would face an unfair trial, or worse, if extradited.
The political sensitivity of Berezovsky’s case was demonstrated by a high-level meeting held at New Scotland Yard on 29 November 2002. It was attended by senior officials from the Foreign Office, the Crown Prosecution Service, the Fraud Squad, and the police. ‘There is significant involvement and interest from Tony Blair and Jack Straw [then Foreign Secretary],’ said the Foreign Office representative at the time. The consensus at the meeting was that Berezovsky’s application for asylum would be refused and he would be told to take refuge in Israel where he has citizenship. But they accepted that his appeal would be successful. ‘The British government is trying to show Russia that we are trying to help them in their political moves against Berezovsky,’ said the same official. ‘Yes, but we can only push this so far because there are no circumstances in which we can extradite back to Russia,’ interjected the police officer. ‘The reality is that he will not receive a fair trial if he returns to Moscow.’
Berezovsky’s extradition hearings eventually began in the spring of 2003, at the height of his propaganda campaign against Putin, and before a decision on his asylum application. At Bow Street Magistrates Court in April he was released on bail of £100,000 pending a full hearing. Court documents reveal that half the bail money was posted by Lord Bell and the rest by Stephen Curtis.
At the preliminary proceedings Berezovsky pleaded that his life would be in danger if he returned to Russia and that he would not receive a fair trial because of the politicized judiciary. The hearings were attended throughout by FSB officers, mostly looking gloomy and stern. The court resembled a scene from a gangster movie: FSB officers mingling with and staring down Berezovsky’s bodyguards and MI5 agents and police officers brushing shoulders with staff from Stephen Curtis’s law firm. None of them exchanged words because they did not want anyone to know that they recognized each other. Just outside the courtroom Berezovsky’s bodyguards were anxious to keep him away from anyone who represented a threat - in effect, most of the people in the room.
The somewhat comic atmosphere was encouraged by the oligarch. On one occasion upon leaving the courtroom, Berezovsky pulled on a paper mask of Putin to demonstrate his opinion that the request for his extradition was little more than a farce. It is said that Putin, watching the news on television, was absolutely furious and so enraged that he let rip with a stream of expletives. ‘I have never seen him so angry,’ said a source close to him.
In the event, the extradition hearings were never concluded. On 11 September 2003 the then Home Secretary David Blunkett granted Berezovsky’s request for asylum on the grounds that he was being pursued for ‘political reasons’. The following day Chief Magistrate Workman rejected the extradition request based on his new asylum status. Berezovsky was ecstatic. ‘This could only happen in England,’ he gleefully remarked to an aide as he accepted a glass of wine back in his Mayfair office.
Throughout the hearings, the application by the Russian prosecutors was unimpressive. The Russians were unable to demonstrate that their judiciary was not under state control. One opinion as to why the application failed was that, if the prosecutors detailed all the evidence against Berezovsky, it would have implicated senior Kremlin officials and politicians. But the truth is likely to be more prosaic. The request was based on the Russian judicial system whereby there is an assumption of guilt and 90 per cent of defendants are convicted, whereas in the UK the opposite is the case. The Kremlin simply presumed that Berezovsky would be extradited and prepared its case accordingly.
Shocked by the judge’s ruling, the Russian prosecutors came to believe that there was something sinister, even underhand, about the way that Berezovsky had resisted extradition. ‘He is being protected by the establishment and the Security Services,’ said one Putin adviser. The Kremlin accused the judge of ‘playing Cold War politics’. But even Berezovsky’s enemies disagreed. ‘He spent a fortune on hiring the best lawyers who worked extremely hard on his behalf,’ commented one.
But the Russian prosecutors were not going to give up and turned instead to Europe for assistance. Since 1999, Swiss authorities had already been assisting them in their pursuit of Berezovsky, much of whose fortune was held in Swiss bank accounts. They handed over quantities of documents relating to the allegations surrounding Aeroflot, granted Russian requests for legal assistance in the extradition hearings, and on occasion agreed to freeze his accounts. In November 2003 Swiss authorities then went a step further and launched their own criminal investigation into Berezovsky’s dealings. This focused on allegations that he had fraudulently transferred millions of dollars from Russian car companies into Swiss banks accounts. ‘We are concerned with criminal justice, not politics,’ said a spokesperson for the prosecutor’s office. ‘We just want to know which ones of Berezovsky’s activities in Switzerland were legal and which ones might have been illegal.’ The move was part of Switzerland’s attempt to clamp down on money laundering and improve the image of its financial sector. Protesting his innocence, Berezovsky dismissed the move as ‘an anti-Semitic act’.7 Ultimately, no further action was taken.
Even the French police became involved, focusing for their part on Berezovsky’s properties. On 7 May 2003 officials searched his villa in Cap d’Antibes as part of an ongoing two-year investigation into money laundering. Two years later, almost to the day, twenty armed police arrived by helicopter at the same villa. Based on a warrant from a Marseilles judge, they searched the premises to determine the origin of the funds used to buy his two villas in the Côte d’Azur. In his defence, Berezovsky made a bold claim. ‘I only rent the villas and so I could not have laundered money through them.’ His lawyer Semyon Aria added, ‘Mr Berezovsky never owned that property. It was not he who took the money, and he never signed any papers. He is accused of being the one who secretly inspired this.’8
At the time of the raid his formidable 81-year-old mother, Anna Alexandrovna, was still living in the villa. Watching television, she was getting ready to go to the opening of the Cannes Film Festival - it took place a short distance from the villa. Suddenly, out of the blue, ‘a helicopter landed near the house and masked, armed men stepped out of it,’ recalled her son. ‘She even thought it was a show in honour of the Film Festival, because she was in Cannes already.’9
Convinced that the FSB were constantly plotting to kill him, Berezovsky not only took expensive and elaborate security precautions but he even commissioned the building of a heavily protected yacht known as Project X. The vessel, which was still running trials in the summer of 2008, had underwater cameras to identify bombs or anything attached to the underside of its hull. Built in Poole, Dorset, the yacht also carried anti-missile devices while living quarters were protected by bullet-proof glass and meeting rooms were equipped with white noise emitters to disrupt bugging.
While it is illegal for his bodyguards to carry guns, the yacht contained an armaments room of legally registered weapons, including small machine pistols and even sonic Air Zula weapons that are capable of knocking people backwards. There was also a weapon that fired rushes of air on a military scale and the same hi-tech sonic device used by cruise ships when faced with pirates on the high seas. According to his staff, Berezovsky also installed ‘toffee guns’, for use by his bodyguards, which fired a jet of glue and disorientated intruders and slowed down their movements. Sometimes his minders also carried ‘dazzlers’, giant flashguns that can temporarily blind people.
During its sea trials in 2008, the vessel was deliberately moved around from port to port throughout the UK and the Mediterranean, while the design details were kept in a safe house in a remote part of Dorset. ‘It is like a mobile castle,’ said a visitor. Berezovsky invested millions in the yacht, which, at the end of 2008, was still being modified. He even bought a $1 million vintage Rolls-Royce just so that he could drive it onto the yacht. Project X is so big that Berezovsky’s current yacht, Thunder, could comfortably fit onto it.
Back in Russia, in a parallel and coordinated operation, jailed fellow oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky also launched a plot to destabilize Putin. ‘He [Khodorkovsky] did not think that the President was personally financially corrupt, but he believed that there was evidence that his advisors and ministers were taking kickbacks on government contracts and abusing their public office,’ said Nigel Brown, of ISC Global. From exile in Israel, Khodorkovsky’s close colleague Leonard Nevzlin masterminded the plot, hiring ISC Global to coordinate the investigation.
‘Operation Fab’ was hatched in early 2004 and it aimed to investigate a number of officials and tycoons close to Putin. The hope was that, if they could find evidence of compromising behaviour by Putin’s allies and supporters, they could damage the President by leaking their findings to the Western media. ‘We were going to create a media frenzy which would have been irresistible,’ said a source close to the operation.
The investigation was discussed at several meetings and budgets were agreed, with Nevzlin authorizing £37 million for the first phase. Funding was to be channelled through Stephen Curtis.
One ISC Global memo to a Yukos lawyer showed how the media was to be used in the strategy: ‘The BBC Newsnight team are hoping to carry a story on Mr A and Operation Fab…The BBC programme on Mr A is a great opportunity to maximize full exposure on this particular individual, the companies he represents, and, without question, his association with Mr P.’
‘Mr A’ was, of course, Roman Abramovich. ‘Mr P’ was Vladimir Putin. ‘Nevzlin thought that if we could find some damaging material on Abramovich and get a lever on him, then he could persuade Putin to lay off the oligarchs and even release Khodorkovsky,’ said a source directly involved. ‘The idea was to go to Abramovich and say, “We won’t expose you if you go to Putin and say let’s call a truce. Why do we need a fight with the oligarchs?”’ Neither the material nor the programme ever materialized.
A second project, code-named ‘Operation Come to Me’, intended to undermine Putin by mobilizing the international student movement, whereby operatives would visit student campuses, secretly fund their publications containing articles highly critical of Putin, and persuade them to agitate against him all over the world. It also aimed to promote the plight of Khodorkovsky globally in the media. Two anti-Putin demonstrations duly took place in London and one in Israel in late 2003. Plans were drawn up for further protests in London, Israel, South Africa, and New York City to coincide with the Russian parliamentary elections.
In the event, the plots were only implemented at their most primitive stages. A short list of state officials and oligarchs was drawn up and investigators were sent to Russia. In 2005 Nevzlin confirmed that if Khodorkovsky was found guilty, he would publish material exposing corruption in the Kremlin. ‘I want to tell about the people who are running the country and stealing from it,’ Nevzlin told the press. ‘I will tell everything: about corruption in the Kremlin, about connections to business, about what kind of money Kremlin officials get, and on what kind of yachts they spend their vacations.’10
Ultimately, because of a breakdown of trust between ISC Global and Nevzlin over the latter’s personal security, the convoluted plots came to nothing. Although Nevzlin agreed to fund the plans on a contingency basis, many of the informants demanded upfront payment and the so the operations were aborted.
Just as a mix of business and political insiders surrounded the oligarch in his days of power at the Kremlin, so Berezovsky soon gathered a new group of dependants and admirers from the steady stream of fellow exiles and dissidents fleeing Putin’s Russia. One of those smuggled out was Alexander Litvinenko. It was Berezovsky who persuaded Litvinenko, a former FSB agent who had fallen foul of the Kremlin, to flee Russia and run his own anti-Putin campaign from London.
Another member of Berezovsky’s inner circle was 58-year-old writer Yuli Dubov, one of his most influential political advisers based in his London office. He was so close to the fugitive billionaire that in 2000 he was able to write Bolshaya Paika, the thinly disguised memoir of Berezovsky’s early years in business, which was later made into the film Oligarkh. Dubov became Chairman and a Director of Kommersant, the Russian newspaper owned by Berezovsky until 2006.
While living in London, Dubov wrote another novel, The Lesser Evil, about an oligarch in exile, which was published in Russia in 2005. The Lesser Evil is, according to Nick Paton Walsh, the Guardian’s Moscow correspondent, part social treatise, part crime novel, part political pamphlet, ‘It addresses the rise of a former KGB officer, through the mysterious bombing of Moscow’s international trade centre and the influence of a conglomerate known as “Infokar”. It’s a series of barely disguised references to Berezovsky’s accusations, denied of course, that Putin engineered apartment bombings in Moscow to justify sending troops into Chechnya, a move that won the former KGB spy an election and led to Berezovsky fleeing the country. Safe to say that Putin is not the “lesser evil” Dubov is referring to, rather his nemesis Berezovsky. The politics of the Russian court remain as transparent and subtle as ever.’11
A long-term ally, Dubov is one of Berezovsky’s last links to his commercial Russian past. A former Director of the car dealership LogoVaz, Dubov was also accused of fraud by the Russian authorities. In 2000 he fled Russia for Great Britain and became another target for extradition. On 7 October 2003 Bow Street Magistrates Court dismissed the extradition case. His lawyers told the court there would be ‘collateral damage’ if he was returned to Russia.
Perhaps the most controversial figure in Berezovsky’s inner sanctum has been Akhmed Zakayev, a bearded, mild-mannered former actor who became an important activist in Chechen resistance. Born in 1959, Zakayev played many leading roles at the state theatre in Grozny, including Hamlet. He became a field commander in the first Chechen war and, under the Chechen leader Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, headed the rebel group’s security service. Later, after the assassination of Yandarbiyev in 2004, he became a close confidant of his successor, Aslan Maskhadov, and was his Vice-Premier and Minister of Education, Culture, and Media. He also conducted negotiations with Moscow on behalf of the de facto Chechen government.
Zakayev left Chechnya after he was wounded in the second Chechen war and took refuge in Turkey until he was forced to leave. The Russians pursued him and he was arrested in Copenhagen by Danish police on 30 October 2002, while attending the World Chechen Congress. The Russian authorities accused him of planning the bloody seizure of a Moscow theatre in that same year and of taking part in other earlier terrorist activities. Denmark’s Justice Ministry refused his extradition due to lack of evidence but he was arrested again on his arrival in the UK on 5 December 2002. He was freed after the actress Vanessa Redgrave put up £50,000 bail. An activist in the Workers’ Revolutionary Party and a campaigner for human rights in Chechnya, Redgrave worked closely with Lord Bell to orchestrate media campaigns in the run-up to the extradition proceedings for Zakayev. His extradition was duly rejected on 13 November 2003 by Chief Magistrate Workman. ‘There is a substantial risk that Mr Zakayev would be subject to torture’ was the conclusion.
With a safe haven in London, Zakayev continued his campaigning and media work, all the while bankrolled by Berezovsky. They had met in 1997 when Berezovsky was President Yeltsin’s negotiator in Chechnya. In London Alexander Litvinenko worked closely with Zakayev in identifying Russian soldiers allegedly involved in war crimes. The two men’s families also became friends. Living opposite each other in Muswell Hill, north London, Litvinenko and his wife were regular guests at Zakayev’s house and were favourites of the Chechen’s grand-children. When Litvinenko and Zakayev were granted political asylum by the British courts, the decisions were greeted with fury in the Kremlin.
In response to the steady stream of dissident arrivals in London, Putin expanded and intensified his intelligence presence in London. By 2007, there were more than thirty Russian intelligence officers based in London; working for the SVR or the GRU (the main foreign intelligence agencies of the Russian Federation), they maintained a presence not seen in Britain since the Cold War. Some of these officers were working officially - the senior intelligence officer, or ‘Resident’, is always identified to the Foreign Office, as is his British counterpart in Moscow. But others, under the guise of the diplomatic or trade missions, worked undercover, investigating and monitoring political events in Westminster and Whitehall and at military installations, just as they had during the Soviet era. The scale of the Russian presence was heavily criticized by the head of MI5, Jonathan Evans, in a speech in November 2007: ‘It is a matter of some disappointment to me that I still have to devote significant amounts of equipment, money, and staff to countering this threat [of covert Russian intelligence activity].’
Russian spies were also targeting the oligarchs and dissidents making London their home, as well as those of their British associates. In 2005 Vanessa Redgrave was confronted with a sizeable demonstration outside her north London home, organized by a pro-Putin group called ‘Marching Together’, which was campaigning for the extradition of Zakayev. The group, run from Moscow, advertised in a London-based Russian newspaper for young Russian immigrants to take part in demonstrations and then paid them each £15 to turn up. The actress was targeted because of her championing of Zakayev and her closeness to Berezovsky. Following the demonstration, she invested in extensive security and counter-surveillance equipment at her home.
‘Marching Together’ held at least six demonstrations in London during 2005. In a larger protest in Trafalgar Square that October, they carried banners declaring, ‘Merry Xmas, Mr Zakayev. Stop Your Bloody Business’ and ‘Get Out of the UK’. According to Novaya Gazeta, the group - which claims 100,000 members in Russia - is funded by Gazprom, the giant state-owned gas and energy conglomerate that acts, in effect, as an arm of the Kremlin.
Berezovsky’s criticism of Putin is that he has turned Russia into an authoritarian state, smothering opposition, controlling the media, and centralizing power. There is no doubt that Putin has weakened the democratic process, stamped on press freedom, and emasculated the power of the country’s governors and Parliament through a process described by one expert as ‘stealth authoritarianism’.12 But as one analyst put it, Putin set out to modernize Russia, not democratize it.
Apart from independent newspapers like the business daily Vedomosti and the liberal radio station Ekho Moskvy - which together reach only a tiny audience - most of the Russian media became either state-controlled or pro-Putin. Putin seized control of the formerly combative television stations ORT and NTV because he understood the power of television in managing his own image. From then, state-run television - the main source of information for 85 per cent of Russians - enjoyed a near monopoly, rarely giving a voice to opposition figures or reporting anti-Putin demonstrations.
There was another, darker side to the dissent. Between 2000 and 2008, at least thirteen dissident Russian journalists - most investigating state corruption and its links with organized crime - were killed, of which the gunning down of Anna Politkovskaya in October 2006 was the most high profile. None of the murders has yet been solved. Other notable assassinations have included those of Eduard Markevich, Editor and Publisher of the newspaper Novy Reft, known for its strident criticism of local officials, and Valery Ivanov, Editor-in-Chief of Tolyatinskoye Obozreniye, who was shot eight times. Eighteen months later his successor at the independent newspaper was stabbed to death. In 2007 the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists identified Russia as the third most dangerous place to work in the world after Iraq and Algeria.
Another prominent murder was that of 42-year-old Paul Klebnikov, the Manhattan-born, Russian-speaking investigative business reporter who launched the Russian edition of Forbes in 2004. A descendant of Russian émigrés who left after 1917, he wrote Godfather of the Kremlin, a biography of Berezovsky.13
The first edition of Forbes Russia, published in May 2004, drew up the first-ever list of Russia’s 100 richest people. Written by Klebnikov, the study - entitled ‘The Golden Hundred’ - uncovered thirty-six dollar billionaires and estimated that Moscow alone had thirty-three, more than any other city in the world, including New York. If anything, these figures probably understated the actual number of billionaires, since many of them had hidden away so much of their true wealth.
Forbes Russia found something even more significant: Russia had more billionaires in proportion to the size of its economy than any other country in the world. The combined wealth of the top 100 was the equivalent of 25 per cent of Russia’s GDP at the time.14 This gave Russia the world’s highest concentration of wealth. By contrast, in the United States, which traditionally tops the developed world’s inequality league, the combined wealth of the country’s 277 billionaires only amounted to 6 per cent of its GDP.
The publication of ‘The Golden Hundred’ was not popular among those listed: the last thing many of the oligarchs wanted was to highlight details of just how rich they were. Many of them protested about their inclusion. Some questioned the size of their identified fortunes. While some were high-profile individuals, they had made extensive efforts to keep details of their personal wealth very private. ‘Forbes couldn’t find a worse time and place,’ said one oligarch. ‘The only reaction I get from discussing personal wealth in our country is high blood pressure.’15
Executives at the Sibneft oil company were especially displeased. ‘The ratings have no connection with reality, the numbers are wildly speculative, the methodology used by the magazine is clouded in darkness,’ said its head of public relations. In contrast, the image-conscious Berezovsky protested that his listed fortune of $620 million was actually understated: ‘In the middle of 1995 Forbes estimated my wealth at $3 billion,’ he complained. ‘That means that I’ve either spent $2.5 billion or their current estimates are incorrect.’16
For Paul Klebnikov, the first edition of Forbes’ Russian edition also proved to be his last. Six weeks later he was dead, shot four times at point-blank range in a gangland-style killing as he left his office in central Moscow. Although it was a contract killing, the culprit and his paymasters will probably never be known or brought to justice.
Since the end of communism, there has been little effective political opposition in Russia. During Putin’s reign, most opposition parties were forced to close while many were excluded from standing by the tightened electoral rules. The only real opposition has been the Russian Communist Party and a coalition called The Other Russia, whose leaders include former world chess champion Garry Kasparov. Although The Other Russia has organized the odd demonstration, it has effectively been unable to operate freely. Kasparov only travels with armed bodyguards and has been the subject of constant harassment, raids, and police intimidation.
In 2006 the World Bank ranked Russia one-hundred-and-fifty-first out of 208 countries in terms of political stability, democratic voice, the rule of law, and control over corruption. Despite this, polls suggested the majority of the population appeared to continue to support Putin and his malleable successor, Dmitri Medvedev, even if this support was relatively shallow. Backing for Putin is partly a product of the nation’s cultural affinity for authority and strong leadership. But for most Russians, the Western-style democracy of the pre-Putin era became synonymous with corruption and the enrichment of the few.
In Russia the oligarchs have long been the butt of popular satire. While campaigning for the 2007 parliamentary elections, Gennady Zyuganov, the long-standing leader of the Communist Party, liked to tell a joke about Abramovich, ‘Roman arrives in heaven and is met by St Paul. The saint asks Abramovich, “Is it true that you own Chelsea, five yachts, and a five-kilometre stretch of beach in the South of France?” “Yes,” replies the oligarch. “Well,” says St Paul, “I don’t think you’re going to like it here.”’
Some describe Russia’s political system as a ‘managed democracy’ - part market economy, part centralized state. Robert Amsterdam, Khodorkovsky’s attorney, has likened it to ‘market Bolshevism’.17 The opposition’s critique is blunted by its own lack of democratic credentials. Berezovsky likes to quote Sir Winston Churchill, who said that democracy was ‘the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time’.
But Berezovsky is hardly one to take the moral high ground on democracy, for it was his brazen and partisan use of his own media empire that helped engineer the re-election of Yeltsin in 1996 and Putin’s ascendancy to the Presidency in 2000. What he chooses to ignore is that he and his fellow oligarchs were central players in the creation of modern-day Russia.
In 2001 Berezovsky formed a new opposition party, Liberal Russia, jointly led by himself and Sergei Yushenkov, intended to unite leading businessmen and supporters of the free market. The plan was to run candidates in the 2003 Duma elections but the party was plagued by internal dissent. In April 2003 Yushenkov was shot dead by an unknown gunman in front of his house.
Some of Berezovsky’s campaigning has been channelled through the International Foundation for Civil Liberties, his political lobbying group. The foundation, established in 2000, is based in New York City and run by the dissident biologist Alex Goldfarb, who was employed by the billionaire investor George Soros to head a programme combating tuberculosis worldwide. Goldfarb met Berezovsky when Soros was investing in Russia during the Yeltsin era and became one of the oligarch’s closest confidants.
Once potential business partners, Berezovsky and Soros collided over Soros’s financial backing of a rival, Vladimir Potanin, in the bitterly contested auction for Svyazinvest, the giant state telecommunications company. They soon became irreconcilable and at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos in 1996 they clashed badly over Berezovsky’s business methods. In the 1990s Berezovsky outstripped even his fellow oligarchs in the vigour of his business techniques. Soros himself had long warned of the severe dangers of no-holds-barred markets and regarded many of the oligarchs as the architects of the ‘robber capitalism’ of the time.18 On one occasion he claimed that he started to fear Berezovsky. ‘His anger gave me the chills.’19
Berezovsky’s foundation funded a range of protest groups in Russia, from anti-war activists to local human rights watchdogs. Its organizer in Russia once told the paper Komsomolskaya Pravda that money was also used to fund ‘rallies and street marches’ and that a demonstration of 3,000 people would cost a few thousand dollars. It also funded several websites, underwrote films alleging that the FSB were involved in the Moscow apartment bombings, and financed expensive advertisements in the New York Times and the Financial Times attacking Putin’s civil rights record. For Berezovsky, the International Foundation for Civil Liberties was an integral part of his operation - ‘a grassroots network that could evolve into an anti-establishment political party’.
Much of Berezovsky’s political networking has been filtered through the little-known Global Leadership Foundation (GLF), which comprises a group of former political leaders who provide confidential advice to current rulers, notably in emerging markets. The GLF was set up by Graham Barr, an associate of Lord Bell and an executive of Chime Communications (Bell’s holding company), and former South African President F. W. de Klerk. The foundation was launched in March 2004, at Chevening in Kent, the official country residence of the British Foreign Secretary, an indication that the GLF was sanctioned by the government.
Prominent members of the GLF have included former International Development Minister Baroness Chalker, former adviser to President Reagan, Chester Crocker, and former British diplomat Sir John Shepherd. Berezovsky was a founding member of the GLF’s International Council, making a donation and maintaining involvement through his own International Foundation.
Berezovsky believed that he could destabilize Russia by stirring up opposition in its former satellite states. To encourage this, he has channelled money to opposition groups in Ukraine and Latvia. In his November 2004 speech to the Oxford University Russian Society he claimed that he had spent some $25 million in former Soviet states, all aimed at weakening the power of Russia. He also substantially underwrote the ‘Orange Revolution’ in Ukraine in 2004-5, which led to the victory of Viktor Yushchenko over the Moscow-backed Viktor Yanukovich. It was a major setback for Putin.
Berezovsky’s legal status meant that his movements were severely restricted. He could only fly openly to Israel, where, as a Jew, he knew that he would never be extradited. In the UK those granted asylum are allowed a new legal name as a way of giving them extra protection from their pursuers. They are then provided with new British documents registered in that new name, including a passport. Berezovsky chose the name Platon Yelenin: Platon was the first name of the character in the 2002 film Oligarkh, Yelena the name of the woman with whom he has been living for many years.
In late 2003, after Berezovsky was granted asylum, he flew to the Georgian capital of Tbilisi in a private jet owned by Badri Patarkatsishvili, his friend and former business partner. In order to get into Georgia, he used the Yelenin passport to avoid being arrested. This was not a name known to the Russians and therefore did not appear on the international wanted list provided by Interpol or Russian prosecutors. Despite the subterfuge, Georgian officials recognized the fugitive and could have arrested him but refused to do so. The Russians were furious about the visit and issued high-level protests to both Georgia and Britain.
When the two men were carving up Russia’s natural resources in the 1990s, it was Patarkatsishvili who took the lead while Berezovsky pulled the levers of political power in the Kremlin. A man who had spent his life hiding from the spotlight, it was entirely out of character when, in late 2003, Patarkatsishvili suddenly emerged from the shadows to become involved in Georgian politics.
Forced into exile in Georgia (which refused to extradite him to Russia), Patarkatsishvili helped to finance the ‘Rose Revolution’ of 2003, which toppled the pro-Kremlin Eduard Shevardnadze and brought the pro-Western Mikheil Saakashvili to power. He then invested heavily in Georgian business: buying Dinamo Tbilisi Football Club; oil terminals; and a holiday resort on the Black Sea. He became Chairman of Georgia’s Olympic Committee and funded charities, an amusement park, and a monastery.
In 2006 Patarkatsishvili bought all of Berezovsky’s assets and shares in their joint enterprises. These included Kommersant (which he then sold to Alisher Usmanov) and businesses in Serbia and Georgia. In May of that year he also purchased a country house in the UK, the £9 million Downside Manor in Leatherhead, Surrey, a Palladian-style mansion set in extensive grounds, with a swimming pool, tennis courts, and ornamental gardens. According to locals, Patarkatsishvili bought the property from the Qatari Ambassador to London. Eight months later, in December 2006, he bought Broadlands on the Bagshot Road in Ascot for £20 million.
Patarkatsishvili was drawn reluctantly into the political arena by Berezovsky. He had fallen out with the new Georgian President he had helped into power and, together with Berezovsky, launched a high-profile opposition campaign against Saakashvili. In late 2007 he had a secret meeting in London with a Georgian Interior Ministry official. Patarkatsishvili outlined his plans for a coup d’état. During the conversation, recorded by the official, he also offered the minister a £50-million bribe if he would remove the Interior Minister, Vano Merabishvili.
The tape was leaked and Georgia’s Prosecutor-General’s office launched a criminal investigation against Patarkatsishvili, charging him with conspiring to overthrow the state. He admitted to the authenticity of the tape and wisely remained in London and Israel. Later that month the government plotted revenge: a Georgian official and a contract killer discussed ‘options for making Badri disappear’ and their conversation was also recorded. ‘I know about the tape and I was told that it is very serious,’ said Patarkatsishvili. ‘I have one hundred and twenty bodyguards but I know that’s not enough. I don’t feel safe anywhere and that is why I’m not particularly going to Georgia.’20
In November 2007, when Patarkatsishvili became a presidential candidate in the Georgian elections, he was given immunity from prosecution and the criminal investigation against him was suspended. But, as an absentee candidate, he only won 7 per cent of the vote and in January 2008 he was once again charged over the illegal conspiracy.
A month later, on the afternoon of 13 February 2008, Patarkatsishvili attended a meeting at Bell Pottinger’s offices at Curzon Street, Mayfair. In attendance were his lawyer, Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney-General until June 2007, his PR adviser, Lord Bell, and some Russian exiles, notably Nikolai Glushkov (another exile in Berezovsky’s intimate circle, who had by this time been released from jail in Russia), and Yuli Dubov. At 6 p.m. Patarkatsishvili started to feel unwell and left the room for some fresh air.
At 7.30 p.m. his chauffeur-driven car took him back to Downside Manor. After dinner with his wife and children, he went upstairs and immediately collapsed. An ambulance was called but he was soon pronounced dead. At 3 a.m. his widow called Berezovsky and told him the bad news. His public statement did not reflect his private anguish. ‘This is a huge loss for all of his family and friends,’ he said. In fact, he was devastated. His staff had never seen him so depressed and so desolate.
At first Surrey police treated the Georgian’s death as suspicious, purely because it was so sudden and there had been no prior warnings of ill health. The investigation was transferred to the major crimes unit but post-mortem results subsequently suggested that he had died of natural causes.
None of this high-level international plotting stopped Berezovsky from enjoying himself. On 23 January 2006 he celebrated his sixtieth birthday - in style. He hired Blenheim Palace, the ancestral home of the 11th Duke of Marlborough and the birthplace of Sir Winston Churchill. Although the FSB tried to stop its departure, he also chartered a private jet to fly some journalists in from Moscow. Guests - a mix of Berezovsky’s inner circle and Western dignitaries - were greeted by a huge ice sculpture, flanked by bottles of frozen vodka and bowls of caviar. Berezovsky’s favourite singer, Cesaria Evora, performed a dozen of her ballads.
The guest of honour was Rupert Murdoch (Berezovsky had himself been one of the eighty-two guests at Murdoch’s wedding to Wendi Deng on board his yacht in New York Harbor in June 1999). But the real surprise of the evening was the appearance of an infamous oligarch and Berezovsky’s once bitter rival, the fugitive Vladimir Gusinsky. He arrived with a giant cake out of which Berezovsky’s 13-year-old daughter jumped to dance for the guests. Before falling out badly, the two men had at one stage been the most powerful media barons in Yeltsin’s Russia. Exile seemed to have changed all that, as the two now shared a new common enemy.
A year later Berezovsky told the Moscow radio station Ekho Moskvy, still owned by Gusinsky, that he wanted to see Putin overthrown. ‘President Putin violates the constitution and any violent action on the opposition’s part is justified today,’ he said. ‘That includes taking power by force, which is exactly what I am working on…The regime is doomed and I want to see it collapse before Russia collapses.’ A few days later a letter arrived at the Home Office. It was a renewed extradition request for the outspoken Berezovsky. This time the charges had been extended from fraud and embezzlement to include ‘attempting a coup against the Russian government’.
Russian prosecutors still believed that Britain was protecting a businessman indicted on numerous fraud charges and now openly plotting the violent overthrow of a foreign state. Privately, the Foreign Secretary Jack Straw was furious at Berezovsky’s outburst, warning him that advocating the violent overthrow of a sovereign state could see him stripped of his refugee status. Straw told the Commons that the government ‘would take action against those who use the UK as a base from which to foment violent disorder or terrorism in other countries’.
Knowing that the courts would be unlikely to grant the new extradition request, the provocative Berezovsky ignored Straw’s warnings. A few months later he repeated his clarion call. ‘We need to use force to change this regime,’ he told the Guardian. ‘It isn’t possible to change this regime by democratic means.’ When pressed, he admitted that he was fomenting an insurrection.21 Three days later he told Radio Free Europe, ‘I am in collusion with people from Putin’s close circle with the intention of overthrowing Putin’s anti-constitutional regime.’ He added that he was bankrolling people close to the President, members of Russia’s ruling elite, in order to mount a coup. This coup included members of Garry Kasparov’s opposition party, The Other Russia.
The Home Office was again forced to investigate Berezovsky. A Home Office spokesman told us, ‘We were very much aware of the comments made by Boris Berezovsky in the Guardian and officials in the Border and Immigration Branch Agency of the Home Office have studied the comments attributed to him. However, we cannot reveal the outcome of that review.’ Nevertheless, Berezovsky later backtracked, claiming that he was not in favour of a violent overthrow.
Unsurprisingly, the FSB kept a close eye on his activities. Announcing the issue of another international arrest warrant in December 2001, a Russian police official warned, ‘We know what he eats for breakfast, where he has lunch, and where he buys his groceries.’22 According to Alex Goldfarb, the FSB checked his every move, bugged his telephone conversations, checked his emails, and mounted surveillance.
Despite his long and expensive campaigns, Berezovsky’s achievements have been limited. He has kept Putin’s excesses in the public eye, endlessly repeated the allegation that it was the FSB that bombed the Moscow apartments, and has kept human rights in Russia on the media agenda. His funding of the ‘Orange Revolution’ in Ukraine was undoubtedly influential, and his campaigning, orchestrated by Bell Pottinger, contributed to increasingly common anti-Putin sentiments in the Western media. Indeed, the Kremlin has long complained about Britain’s Russophobia.
But Berezovsky has enjoyed very little genuine credibility as a substantial political figure and has developed no popular base for his ‘democratic revolution’. His foundation may have succeeded in winning support from a tiny minority of Russians who have been helped, but he has remained a figure derided by most ordinary Russians. Not that this bothers him. ‘I know that most Russians don’t like me but I don’t care what they think,’ he once admitted.23
Berezovsky’s supporters have likened him to a twenty-first-century Leon Trotsky, who used his time in exile to organize opposition against Stalin. But, unlike Trotsky, Berezovsky’s attacks have been little more than skilfully orchestrated acts of bravado. The level of support enjoyed by Berezovsky among Russia’s elite - even among anti-Putin activists - has been minimal. Opposition figures have mostly shunned his advances. One analyst referred to the clique around Berezovsky as the ‘party of oligarchic revenge’. Another analyst dismissed his attempts at destabilizing Russia as ‘the usual bluff’.24
In Britain Berezovsky may have proved an irritant to the Foreign Office and Britain’s own security services but others defended his right to free speech. ‘Although Berezovsky’s outspoken attacks on Putin may have contributed to deteriorating relations with Russia, that is mostly Russia’s fault,’ said David Clark of the Russia Foundation. ‘Britain should not deny the right of free speech for reasons of improving international relations; that would be wrong. However inconvenient we find it, we can’t trample over our own democratic standards just to mollify Putin and those like him.’ Others have taken a contrary view. Labour MP Ken Purchase asked the Commons’ Foreign Affairs Committee, ‘Why do we not send him back to Russia? He has called for the overthrow of the Russian government.’25
The British courts’ decisions to grant asylum to the oligarch and other Russians, such as Litvinenko, Zakayev, and a number of Yukos executives, certainly strained relations between the two countries. Putin raised the matter personally with Tony Blair while the latter was Prime Minister. That deteriorating relationship was demonstrated only too vividly by the way in which the former British Ambassador in Moscow, Sir Anthony Brenton, was repeatedly intimidated by a nationalist youth movement called Nashi (‘Our People’). The group - obviously well informed about his movements - trailed and heckled the Ambassador through the Moscow traffic, organized anti-British demonstrations outside the embassy, and triggered a violent incident outside his residence.
Founded by the Kremlin, Nashi is reminiscent of Komsomol, the former Communist Party youth movement. Its members like to parade in T-shirts emblazoned with Putin’s portrait and are involved in regular anti-Western actions, notably burning literature considered too liberal and disrupting meetings organized by Russia’s beleaguered opposition.
Berezovsky’s tirades against Putin have enjoyed a wide audience in the UK and have chimed with the views of most of the foreign policy establishment. His wealth has brought him access to influence. While the British government has occasionally chided Berezovsky over his more outrageous remarks, it has turned a blind eye to his background, apparently only too happy to have his money in the country.
Some of those who know Berezovsky believe that he deserves the same fate as Khodorkovsky. Others argue that, despite a chequered past, his reinvention of himself as a democratic campaigner deserves to be taken seriously. Berezovsky sees himself as a victim of Putin’s authoritarianism. In truth he is the architect of his own fate. He helped create the conditions that saw not just the rise of Putin but also the revival of Soviet-style policies. As he once admitted, his actions have always been self-serving: ‘I view the world through the prism of the New Testament. Freedom is the most important thing. Whatever I do in life, I do it for myself. That doing-it-for-others type of hypocrisy isn’t for me. I don’t understand it. I believe that I do everything for my own sake. It’s another matter entirely that what I do for myself frequently happens to benefit others. Remember the Bible? Where it says “Love thy neighbour as thyself. Not as you love your mother or your child, but as you love yourself”.’
Berezovsky’s long campaign against Putin has eluded most of the British public. Few believed that the world of the oligarchs had much impact on London other than through the power of their wealth. That was all about to change in the most dramatic of circumstances.