When Boris Johnson—the journalist-turned-politician who is, at the time of writing, still prime minister—was Mayor of London, he used to hold regular public events where ordinary Londoners could ask him questions. They were billed as exercises in transparency, which no doubt they were, but they also gave a man who liked performing an opportunity to perform. The mayor made people laugh with his tousled-hair posh-boy shtick, which he probably hoped was enough for many of his constituents.
In July 2009, however, his bluff was called. At an auditorium in Croydon a man called Ajit Chambers, a smooth-cheeked former banker with close-cropped hair turning silvery at the temples, rose to ask a question. He had, he said, identified forty disused London Underground stations, and he wanted to transform them into tourist attractions. “San Francisco has Alcatraz; Paris has its catacombs,” he said. “I have a proposal. I have been trying to get it to TfL.”
Johnson jumped in. TfL—Transport for London, which oversees the capital’s trains, buses, taxis, trams and other modes of public transport—is one of the few bodies that the mayor runs, so this was something he could theoretically do something about. And it was the kind of unusual idea that would catch the eye of any journalist, not least one as successful as him. “It is brilliant. I love it. London Underground. OK, we are going underground,” he said.
The mayor asked Chambers a few follow-up questions about these “ghost stations,” which Johnson appears not to have heard of, although they’re pretty well known among people who travel on the Tube. If you know when to stare out into the darkness, you can even see the old platforms as they flash by. Johnson promised that his staff would evaluate the proposal and follow up. This was great news for Chambers, who had been trying to interest the mayor’s office in the plan via more official channels but had struggled to get it past City Hall officials. His peculiar business idea finally had the chance to break through.
There is undeniably something romantic about the ghost stations, about the idea of space which once thronged with people and bustle but is now abandoned to mice and dust. I have a recurrent dream about opening a door in my house and wandering through room after room that I have for some reason never been into, and the old stations have that same appeal: free space thick with history and ripe with potential. And there is undeniably a business case for opening up old transport infrastructure; the High Line in Manhattan is just a long walkway to nowhere in particular, but people love the chance to stroll where the trains once rattled along, and do so in their thousands.
That does not of course mean Chambers’s business idea was necessarily a viable proposition. For one thing, although dozens of stations have been closed over the years, there aren’t forty actual ghost stations in the sense of places you could walk into and convert into something new. Most have been demolished. For another thing, the ghost stations that do exist are still stations, packed with power lines and machinery and—at platform level—speeding trains. For a final thing, space in London is expensive: almost any surplus building in the capital that can be reused has long ago been reused.
However, if anyone was going to make a go of breathing life back into the ghosts it was Ajit Chambers, who was almost comically persistent. He took to haunting Johnson’s public events, and his appearances became so predictable that a columnist at The Times called him “London’s foremost Boris-botherer.” Chambers would rise to his feet and appeal to the mayor to cut through whatever objections had been raised in private by officials. Johnson had built his career on being a plain-speaking critic of the nannying tendencies of the state, and it was hard for him to publicly block free enterprise. In official emails City Hall officials would try to kill off Chambers’s idea on the grounds of health, safety, cost or something else, only for Johnson to bring it back to life at public events. “All I want to know from you is that we can do this at no cost to the taxpayer,” said Johnson at a public meeting a year after that first encounter. Chambers insisted that he could, and the adventure was back on track. Chambers identified the most promising place to start: Brompton Road, a ghost station in west London about halfway between Harrods and the Victoria and Albert Museum, which was closed in the 1930s for lack of passengers.
His vision for the site—of holographic passengers in period dress at platform level, a rooftop bar and an event space for album launches or other corporate events in the old ticket hall—was sufficiently exciting to catch not just the attention of newspaper columnists but even a publication as sober as The Economist. And it does sound pretty cool: “a veritable Tutankhamen’s tomb of discarded treasures—huge industrial fans, gas-sealed doors, even a cinema for the troops stationed there for the war.” A handful of events actually took place in the station, and people who attended them still excitedly describe the thrill of descending the old stairs to platform level, of seeing a huge map dating from when this was an anti-aircraft command post in the Second World War, of the sign saying DANGER AMMUNITION. Chambers’s persistence had won through. All he needed was for public officials to sign over the lease, and those years of Boris-bothering would have paid off.
And that is where the plan fell apart. Butler Britain had different ideas.
The fact that events were held at the Brompton Road site, and held successfully, shows that it would have been possible to use it as a tourist attraction and to sensitively showcase this bit of London’s history, even if the idea of holographic soldiers descending from a holographic train sounds far-fetched. It might even have been possible to make a decent profit from it. There will always be demand for another bar or restaurant in Knightsbridge, and the station would undeniably have been a unique event space. The true obstacle to Chambers’s plan, however, was not health-and-safety legislation or even doubts over profitability, but something that Britain’s work as a butler has embedded so deeply in government that I suspect most politicians don’t even know it’s there. To hand over the old Brompton Road station to Ajit Chambers, the government department that owned it—which, since the Second World War had been the Ministry of Defense—would have to overcome the reflex to sell things to the highest bidder, whoever they are and whatever their intentions. Chambers claimed to have raised £25 million to back his project, but as it turned out that wouldn’t even have bought half of the ghost on Brompton Road when it finally changed hands in early 2014.
That sale was the final act in a remarkable tale that demonstrates how Britain is prepared to be butler to anybody, no questions asked, if the price is right. When the government was asked to choose between helping an entrepreneur to realize an eccentric dream that would enrich its capital city in a truly unique way or selling an asset to the highest bidder, there was only going to be one winner, and it wasn’t going to be Ajit Chambers.
It’s a well hidden story that requires some excavating. So, as Boris Johnson put it in that first encounter with Chambers, we’re going underground.
First of all, we need to dig into where the money that bought the ghost station came from. To understand that, we need to go back in time to the days of the Cold War, when the Communist Party still wielded unchecked power over Russia and the other Soviet republics. The Soviet Union, which had been seen as a great economic rival of the West in the years after the Second World War, was falling rapidly behind. By the 1970s, it was clear that Moscow’s plans to provide prosperity for all had been indefinitely postponed. Indeed, it was all the country could do to cling on to the gains it had made. While prosperity, mass fashion, pop culture, and labor-saving devices spread through North America and Western Europe, Soviet citizens queued for hours for basic essentials.
The USSR did, however, have one thing that the West lacked: vast quantities of natural gas, which it used to power its factories, to heat its homes and to earn valuable dollars as exports to the West. This abundance of gas—controlled by the country’s first state-run corporation, Gazprom—helped stitch the Soviet economy together, and nowhere more so than in Ukraine, which was a center of heavy industry second only to Russia. Ukraine’s factories and chemical works were dependent on pipelines bringing fuel from the same distant Russian and Central Asian gas fields that exported gas to Europe. Thanks to this subsidized source of energy, the factories could compete with their rivals, and millions of Ukrainians had stable, well-paid jobs.
And then in 1991 everything changed. The Soviet Union collapsed. Ukraine became independent and went overnight from being an energy-rich country to being energy poor. Its factories were only viable because of cheap natural gas, and it had hardly any gas of its own. Without its factories, its people would have no work; if its people had no work, its economy would collapse. Logically, one of two things should then have happened. Ukraine should either have rapidly become far more efficient in its use of gas, closing the hungrier industries, finding new ways to earn a living, so its imports and exports could balance each other, or it should have been essentially reabsorbed into Russia. The first option was economically ruinous; the second option was politically inconceivable.
Fortunately the need to reach an immediate decision was postponed by the fact that Russia also relied on gas. Its economy survived thanks to the hard currency it earned by exporting gas to Europe, and almost all those exports passed through Ukraine. That meant that if Ukraine couldn’t pay its gas bills, it could just steal it from the pipelines that transited its territory, and Russia couldn’t turn off the taps without also cutting off its high-paying customers farther west. As a result, the politicians in Kyiv never had to make the hard decision about the future of their industries that rational economics demanded that they should, and instead persisted in a strange limbo between the future and the past. Thus was born a uniquely Ukrainian phenomenon, which economists call “rents of energy dependency.”
It is well established that large reserves of oil or gas almost invariably corrupt countries—think of Angola, Nigeria, Venezuela or indeed Russia—since those in power battle to control the money flows rather than serve the public. Ukraine became very corrupt as well, but in a different way: the corruption derived not from controlling the gas, but from the pipelines that moved it, and thus the ability to reward supporters with valuable shipments, or export licenses. This wasn’t so much rent-seeking behavior as toll-seeking. Insiders in Russia and Ukraine teamed up to create shady intermediary companies that took gas from Gazprom at the Russian border, sold it to high-paying Europeans and split the proceeds. Often they paid for the gas not with money but with goods, and barter transactions added a layer of opacity to the deals, which made them even harder for ordinary citizens to understand. Nothing did more to corrupt Ukraine or to maintain its dependence on Moscow than its politicians’ addiction to this money. Russia added the cost of the stolen gas to Ukraine’s bill, but the insiders didn’t care, since they were allowed to keep the profits.
When Vladimir Putin became Russian president in 2000, however, he decided that—at least at the Russian end—this wealth machine needed to be brought in house. If anyone was going to get rich from exporting gas, it was going to be him and his friends, not Gazprom managers and their shady enablers. It took him a little while to wrestle the old guard out of the door, but eventually he had a loyalist in charge of the giant gas concern. There would still be an intermediary company between Russia and Ukraine, so the money flows would remain hidden, but that company would be half-owned by Gazprom to ensure Putin got his share. Its name was RosUkrEnergo (RUE), and it took over gas supplies between the two countries in July 2004.
That was a big year in Ukraine. In the autumn the prime minister, a thug called Viktor Yanukovich who was heavily backed by Putin, tried to win the presidency by rigging an election. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians took to the streets of Kyiv, waving the orange flags of Yanukovich’s rival Viktor Yushchenko, whose surname became the demonstrators’ three-syllable battle cry. After weeks of continuous protests, the election was re-held, Yanukovich lost, and Kyiv held a giant party called the Orange Revolution. For young Ukrainians it was a glorious expression of how ordinary people can triumph over the corrupting influence of oligarchs and their money.
For Putin, however, who had spent time and money backing Yanukovich, Ukraine’s revolution was a personal humiliation. Fortunately, he had a useful way to remind Ukrainians—and any other countries tempted to follow Ukraine’s lead—why humiliating the Kremlin was a bad idea. Gazprom told the post-revolutionary government it would be renegotiating its gas supply contract, and when Ukraine refused to agree to its terms, cut it off. In the depths of winter the whole country suddenly realized quite how dependent it was on Russian goodwill.
There’s a plaintive account in the State Department archive released by Wikileaks of a meeting between the US ambassador and Yushchenko’s prime minister. It describes the sudden urgency of the choice that had previously been postponed since 1991. “He was on the horns of a dilemma. If he went ahead with the deal with RUE, he and the Our Ukraine Party would be accused of corruption. If he rejected the deal, he would be accused of plunging Ukraine into the deep freeze as Russia cut off gas.” In some parts of Ukraine it was minus thirty degrees Celsius. Those kinds of temperatures kill, so it was really no choice at all. Kyiv capitulated.
Yushchenko signed the new deal with RUE, a humiliation that irretrievably split the coalition that had powered the revolution and from which his reputation never recovered. RUE was already doing well under the old contract. It made $500 million in 2005, which was before the contract was renegotiated, and the money really started to flow. Ukraine’s state gas company, unable to put up its prices to consumers without risking even further political fallout, lost $500 million in the first three months of 2006—all profits for RUE’s owners.
“Only one source of power proved to be stronger than the Orange Revolution,” wrote a historian. “Not (former) PM Viktor Yanukovich, not Russia, but the power of energy-related interests.” But who were those interests? Who actually were the owners of RUE? Everyone knew that Gazprom owned half of the company, but who owned the other half? Which individual was making the kind of money that only comes when you face down a government and win?
Global Witness, a London-based campaign group that works to expose corruption around natural resources, dug as deep into the contract as it could. It identified the shell companies and the bank accounts, and it picked out a few individuals who seemed to be involved: an Israeli lawyer, a former Hungarian minister, a British businessman, politicians in Turkmenistan and various Ukrainians and Russians, including a notorious mobster called Semyon Mogilevich. But it failed to answer the question of who actually controlled the company. “How is it in the interests of Ukraine, or indeed of Europe, to have such a vital country’s gas supply controlled by complex and opaque business structures?” their report asked.
A couple of days after the report was published, as if to taunt its authors, the owner of the other half of RUE revealed himself. His name was Dmitry Firtash. Global Witness had mentioned him in its report but struggled to find out much about him. His biography was sketchy, and in place of a photograph they had put a question mark. Firtash was only thirty-nine years old, but his company had defeated a government still riding high on the emotions of a popular revolution, and no one even knew what he looked like. That’s power.
In a public relations blitz, Firtash sat down for interviews with the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, and others, telling them details of his life and his plans for the future. Photographs showed him to be a suave businessman in a gray suit with a permanent five-day beard and a slight double chin. According to the accounts he gave, he started out in business selling food to Central Asia, but when his customers failed to pay their bills, he accepted payment in gas, which he sold at a profit in Europe. It was in this complex barter trade that he learned the skills required to run RUE. It never became entirely clear why Putin’s Kremlin should have selected Firtash in particular to be its chosen partner in Kyiv rather than one of the country’s better-known oligarchs. The articles did include allegations that he was linked to the notorious Russian mobster Mogilevich, which might perhaps explain it, but he denied there were direct business ties between them.
Implicit in all the interviews was Firtash’s political heft. Thanks to his alliance with Gazprom and by extension with Putin, he had become not just vastly rich but also hugely influential: the Kremlin’s man in Ukraine, a gas-fueled kingmaker. This was controversial in his home country, where revolutionaries accused him of restoring Russia’s influence over their homeland. It is perhaps unsurprising therefore that Firtash started looking around for a foreign country where he might buy a second home, somewhere that would be more appreciative of his business prowess.
I did ask why Firtash specifically chose the UK to be the beneficiary of his largesse, but received no answer to this, or indeed to any of the other questions I sent over, but it may have something to do with a Ukrainian spin doctor called Vladimir Granovski, who had worked for Yanukovich in the Orange Revolution—and who also failed to reply to my attempts to contact him. He relocated to London on one of the visa programs reserved for “highly skilled migrants,” bought a house for £5.4 million and went into business with Raymond Asquith, an aristocrat and former spy who once smuggled a defector out of the Soviet Union in the boot of his car, as bespoke consultants for wealthy ex-Soviet citizens looking to engage with the UK. Asquith & Granovski Associates devised a plan to integrate Firtash into the UK, and it was extremely successful.
In February 2007 the British Ukrainian Society (BUS) was incorporated, headquartered in Knightsbridge. Granovski and Asquith became directors, along with Firtash’s right-hand man Robert Shetler-Jones; plus a reliable Conservative MP called Richard Spring who provided Asquith & Granovski with advice on “political, economic and current affairs matters” in exchange for £35,000–40,000 a year. “Are we trying to improve our reputation? Of course,” Firtash later told the Wall Street Journal. “I can’t just be the place where people throw darts.”
Another MP, a Labor backbencher called John Grogan, worked closely with the BUS. He’d become interested in Ukraine after being inspired by the Orange Revolution, and he chaired an all-party parliamentary group on the country. “I was slightly naive perhaps. At that stage I wasn’t aware of the funding arrangements,” he told me. I asked him what he thought Firtash was trying to do by supporting the BUS. Grogan said the model was the British Syrian Society, which had been established by Bashar al-Assad’s father-in-law to help build links between London and Damascus and which also had Spring on the board. The BUS’s founding documents laid out objectives that were almost word for word the same as those of its Syrian counterpart. In 2008, in his capacity as chairman of the BUS, Spring secured a parliamentary debate on Ukraine, which is the kind of thing that makes any organization look influential. In the debate he talked at length about how Britain’s interests lay in a democratic, Western-orientated Ukraine free of the taint of corruption.
“For a relatively small amount of money, it’s trying to get influence and good contacts right in the highest reaches of government,” said Grogan. “I suppose reputationally the kind of things the BUS did were in themselves pretty harmless—cultural events or lectures or whatever. No doubt, Firtash was trying to gain friends and influence. I have no idea if he personally met the people involved.”
It doesn’t cost much money to fund a lobbying group, and Firtash’s associates looked around for other projects, which is what took them to a dinner in memory of the composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky at Cambridge University. Ukrainians studying for postgraduate qualifications had organized the event, which was pretty sumptuous by student standards. Held in King’s College’s great hall, with a formal dress code, tickets cost sixty-five pounds a head, and musicians performed some of the composer’s works. According to a source in Cambridge, one of the speakers at the event mentioned that the Ukrainian language was not taught at the university, which seems to have inspired a new project for the oligarch. “Some of these British representatives associated with Firtash approached the organizers of the dinner and asked how much they would need to have Ukrainian taught in one way or another,” the source said.
A mutually acceptable total was agreed, and the university’s Slavic Department organized language classes open to anyone who wanted to learn Ukrainian. “That was where the first few thousand quid came from. Though whether that was actually Dmitry Firtash’s money, I don’t know. I think it was. At that point the foundation didn’t exist as an establishment or institution legally,” the source told me.
The DF Foundation, dedicated to funding education about Ukraine and giving scholarships to students, was created early in 2008. With that, Dmitry Firtash’s British structures were in place. In 2010 Cambridge University created a formal Ukrainian Studies course thanks to a donation of £4 million. “This gift ensures that Cambridge will be a vibrant home for the study of Ukraine for many generations to come,” said Professor Simon Franklin, head of the School of Arts and Humanities, in a press release at the time. “Mr. Firtash has opened up new possibilities for teaching and research at the University of Cambridge.” In March 2011 he was welcomed into Cambridge’s prestigious Guild of Benefactors by none other than the Duke of Edinburgh, the Queen’s husband.
Firtash was busy elsewhere too: he grouped all his businesses into one BVI-based holding company called Group DF. According to later analysis by Reuters, he was able to earn $3 billion just by reselling the gas that Gazprom sold him, thanks to receiving it at an artificially low price, so he was extremely cash-rich. With billions of dollars more in loans from Gazprombank—which made him the Russian bank’s largest single borrower—he expanded fast into fertilizer, titanium, banking and the media. He became president of the Federation of Employers of Ukraine, a lobbyist for companies. He had funded Yanukovich’s successful political comeback—the former prime minister won the 2010 presidential election—so had an ally running his homeland, and thanks to his philanthropy he had met the husband of the queen of his adopted second home too. Everything he touched was turning to gold.
This was a truly astonishing ascent. In little more than the time it took a postgraduate student at Cambridge to earn a doctorate Firtash had gone from being so anonymous that no one knew what he looked like to meeting Prince Philip. He seems to have realized the value of having a public profile in the UK when he took to the British courts to sue a Ukrainian newspaper for reporting on allegations of corruption in the gas trade. The case failed, but Ukrainian journalists told me that just the fact that he had brought it made them think twice before writing about Firtash. British libel cases are easy to lose, and very expensive to fight.
Firtash took to visiting Cambridge quite often, meeting the students whose scholarships he was paying for and bringing along a television crew to see him doing so. Flattery came from the students (“You are offering such a great deal of liberty involved in the program—how come you require nothing in exchange?” asked one student, according to an account on Firtash’s website) and from the university, which gave him a special medal for his outstanding philanthropy.
And he bought himself a London residence, a mansion just down the road from Harrods built by the luxury developer Mike Spink, which according to a property publication cost something in the region of £60 million. Built in an understated fashion in pale brick, it looks relatively modest until you realize there is as much of it underground as there is above. It has a swimming pool in the second basement, and it punches all the way through the block; an anonymous-looking basement flat on a parallel street gives it a discreet back exit.
The location is lovely, with its balconies looking down onto a stretch of pedestrianized garden beside two adjacent churches, the London Oratory and Holy Trinity Brompton. During the London Kleptocracy Tours (they’re based on the Hollywood Tours, but my friends and I highlight properties belonging to people accused of corruption rather than those belonging to people involved in films) this open space provides a convenient spot for the group to stand while we tell them about Firtash. There was a satisfying period when every time we turned up someone in the house would call the police. On one occasion the two officers who drove up within minutes of our arrival had apparently been informed we were extreme Russian nationalists, which was fun for us if a bit confusing for them. After the misunderstanding was ironed out, they stayed to listen to my presentation, however, and I was pleased to see them nodding along by the end.
With this London base, Firtash’s infiltration of the British Establishment became even more ambitious. Toward the end of 2013 he agreed to another donation to Cambridge University and, in a series of events called the Days of Ukraine, opened trading on the London Stock Exchange and visited Parliament with his wife. “We are grateful to Firtash Foundation and all individuals who helped this to happen. We are also grateful to the Chairperson of the Foundation, Lada Firtash, who put all her energy and dedication in the implementation of this project,” said John Bercow, Speaker of the House of Commons, according to a curiously ungrammatical Group DF statement.
“The fact that we are hosted at the British Parliament, and that its Speaker came in person to greet us, demonstrates how important our country is to the UK,” said Firtash in the same statement. In a photograph of the occasion Bercow and Firtash are shaking hands, while Lord Risby—as Richard Spring has been known since he was elevated to the House of Lords—leans slightly forward in the background, hands clasped around a highball glass, with the kind of rapt smile you’d see on the face of a proud father watching his son pick his way through a piano recital.
Back at home, however, Ukraine was entering a turbulent time. Firtash had helped Viktor Yanukovich become president in 2010—indeed, in one of its classified cables the US embassy referred to Firtash as his “patron”—but ordinary Ukrainians were unhappy. Yanukovich’s corruption became ever more blatant, and his profligacy ever more obscene with the building of a huge palace on the outskirts of Kyiv. When Yanukovich announced he would end integration with the European Union and instead align Ukraine with Russia, it proved the final indignity. Protests swelled over the next months into another revolution, and in February 2014 Yanukovich fled to Russia, while Moscow sent troops to seize the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea. If Firtash was concerned by this turn of events, however, he did not show it. As the British government scrambled to make sense of what was happening in Kyiv, the oligarch was invited into the Foreign Office. According to a later statement in Parliament, they did not discuss matters of national security, although some important issues must have been aired, considering that Putin was about to plunge Europe into a crisis that persists to this day. “I tried to persuade them that imposing sanctions against Russia was a bad idea,” Firtash said, according to a report by a Russian news agency. “That will only make things worse. America provoked Putin into this situation.”
In less than a decade Firtash had gone from an unknown and shadowy businessman who had helped Putin dominate Ukraine to a widely praised philanthropist advising a NATO power on how to approach the Russian president, but even this wasn’t quite the high-water mark of Firtash’s influence in Britain. That came three days later, when his purchase of the Brompton Road Tube station for £53 million from the Ministry of Defense was finalized, and Ajit Chambers’s business dream was destroyed. The ghost station directly adjoined Firtash’s London property, and it’s not hard to imagine that he would have loathed Chambers’s plan to create a rooftop bar and restaurant. Late-night revellers would have had a view straight down into his back garden.
He seems to have lacked any equivalent vision of his own for the site, however. The government’s press release announcing the sale made much of the station’s history and the unique features that had so appealed to Chambers, but Firtash showed no sign of being interested in either aspect. “The whole underground station thing isn’t really that interesting,” Mike Spink, who advised Firtash on the sale, wrote to me by email. “In reality, it’s just another prime central London site.”
How’s that for butlering? Britain provided Firtash with a luxury home, welcomed him into the deepest recesses of the Establishment’s bosom, awarded him a medal—containing nearly 500 grams of sterling silver, designed by Jane McAdam Freud and individually numbered—showered him with attention from members of both houses of Parliament, including the Speaker, sold him a central London landmark and asked him to come in and share some thoughts with the Foreign Office. In return it got money for a major university, extra cash for members of Parliament, support for its property developers and millions of pounds straight into the state budget in exchange for an old Tube station that the Ministry of Defense wasn’t even using much.
Criticizing Britain for this may seem a little unfair. Isn’t it just an example of how one butler outcompetes his rivals and serves his clients? Any country would have welcomed Firtash’s money and expertise, so it would have been self-defeating to turn it away, right? Britain should be congratulated, not condemned. As the old song goes, if I don’t do it, somebody else will.
This is a troubling argument. Firtash was Putin’s man in Ukraine, and yet Britain integrated him so enthusiastically into the Establishment that he advised the government on Putin’s invasion. Should it really be talking to a man like this? Or accepting his money? Or selling him a property with access to the London Underground system? Or, indeed anything at all?
“This has clear implications for national security,” noted Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee a few years later about the tendency to invite Kremlin-aligned oligarchs to buy what they liked in the UK. “Turning a blind eye to London’s role in hiding the proceedings of Kremlin-connected corruption risks signaling that the UK is not serious about confronting the full spectrum of President Putin’s offensive measures.”
There are certainly plenty of other Western countries that have helped Firtash transform himself. Cyprus, Hungary and Switzerland sold him his shell companies; Austria provided him with a bank account; ex-politicians from all over Europe have been happy to hitch their names to his various foundations. But other countries behaving badly is no reason for Britain to do so too, not least because Firtash’s integration went so much further in the UK than it did elsewhere. And the response of the United States to his activities provides a fascinating contrast to what happened in the UK and shows that there is an entirely different way to behave. If you look at both sides of the saga of Dmitry Firtash—the American half and the British half—you start to consider the troubling idea that if Britain doesn’t do it, perhaps nobody else will. There don’t have to be butlers.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 euphoria in the United States over having “won the Cold War” rapidly changed to concern. There were messy environmental issues to resolve, economic questions to answer, wars to manage, as well as the USSR’s nuclear arsenal to secure. All these matters were intractable in their own right, but they were made even less tractable by a fifth problem, organized crime. Mafia groups took over chunks of the ex-Soviet Union’s economy and used parts of its territory—particularly the ports of Odessa and St. Petersburg—to smuggle illegal goods into the West. There was much about these mafia groups that was unclear, not least the extent to which they intertwined with official bodies. Were they just a criminal challenge to the Western order, or were they a security challenge too?
Representatives of law enforcement agencies from the United States, Italy, Russia and Germany met in Moscow in 1994 in an attempt to map the emerging mafia structures, which were becoming influential throughout the former Soviet bloc, and were expanding into Israel, Western Europe and the US. American officials were concerned not just about street thugs in Russian-speaking sections of New York, but also by infiltration of the financial system, which was allowing Russian criminals to exert influence in the United States from safe havens overseas.
Many of the ex-communist countries lacked the capacity to investigate organized crime, but also refused to allow the Americans access to the information they needed to conduct their own investigations. Hungary, however, was an exception. It recognized its weakness and invited the Americans to help investigate a Kyiv-born Budapest-based money launderer called Semyon Mogilevich who was gaining influence in the country’s prostitution, smuggling, fraud and corruption rackets. Mogilevich has become infamous in the years since, and is now the most notorious of all the Russian mafiosi, so much so that he is often presented in the media as a Russian boss of bosses. One US source told me, however, that their choice to focus on him in particular had more to do with the available opportunities than with his intrinsic significance. “There were lots of other mob bosses. We went after Mogilevich because he was the only one directing criminal activities in a country that was interested in working with us.”
The Budapest Project, as the FBI called it as if it was a Tom Clancy novel, was not a straightforward operation. Senior Hungarian police officers were on the Mogilevich payroll, so it was hard to know who to trust, and the mobster’s hoods controlled the streets and the nightclubs. “Black-leather-clad gangsters committed brazen extortions and other acts of violence against local citizens and visitors, including United States military personnel en route to peacekeeping duties in the Balkans,” wrote a senior FBI agent in a later article. You can see why Washington was concerned: this was a confident criminal. Most mafia bosses would draw a line at shaking down US servicemen, but not Mogilevich.
In 2000 the FBI opened a permanent base in Budapest, where its officers were embedded with local police and had the same right to carry weapons that they enjoyed at home. The effect was immediate: Mogilevich fled to Moscow, and—in his absence—officials provided thousands of pages of evidence about his money-laundering operations to US investigators. Three years later the FBI indicted him, added him to the list of its Top Ten Most Wanted Criminals, and continued to investigate his associates. One area that investigators became concerned about were gas shipments through Ukraine, and inevitably their attention fell on Dmitry Firtash.
In April 2006, just months after Firtash’s big gas deal helped doom the prospect of Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, the Wall Street Journal announced that US law enforcement was investigating RUE’s ties to organized crime. It was this investigation rather than that of Global Witness that seems to have finally forced Firtash to go public about owning half of RUE’s shares. The WSJ reported that Asquith had gone to Washington on Firtash’s behalf to deny any connection to Mogilevich, which is a denial that Firtash has had to make on a regular basis ever since. “There is no business connection between Mr. Mogilevich and me. I have never had any direct business dealings with him, nor does he have any interests in any of my companies,” Firtash wrote in a letter to the WSJ in 2007. According to an account of a meeting between Firtash and US officials a year later, and released by Wikileaks, “Firtash acknowledged that he needed, and received, permission from Mogilevich when he established various businesses, but he denied any close relationship with him.” (After the cable was published, Firtash issued a statement denying he had ever acknowledged this, and suggested the claim was a “mistranslation or misunderstanding.”)
None of this lobbying succeeded in persuading US officials to stop investigating him, however. While members of the British Parliament took Firtash’s money, the Duke of Edinburgh shook his hand and Cambridge offered him its highest honors, the US embassy in Kyiv kept cabling its suspicions about what he was up to, and FBI agents kept following them up. “Given Firtash’s swift ascent from failing canned foods company manager to multi-billionaire dollar gas magnate, he might still be beholden to the forces that helped him rise so quickly,” one cable noted laconically, after Firtash bought himself a bank.
Hungary became a less welcoming place for FBI agents with the ascent to power of the illiberal kleptocrat-adjacent Victor Orban, which ultimately doomed the Budapest Project, but there were already enough promising leads to follow. It took them years to finally finish the investigation to their satisfaction (“Welcome to the world of doing international cases,” as my US source put it), but eventually they had enough evidence to convince a grand jury to approve an indictment. On March 12, 2014 Austrian police officers arrested Dmitry Firtash in Vienna at the FBI’s request. It was exactly a fortnight after the final approval of his purchase of the Brompton Road Tube station from the British government. Rarely if ever have the contrasting approaches of the US and Butler Britain toward fortunes of questionable origin been displayed in starker contrast.
The immediate response to Firtash’s arrest was confusion, because US officials provided few details of what they suspected him of, beyond making clear that it was something to do with “international corruption conspiracy” and insisting that it was nothing to do with the revolution that had just decapitated the Ukrainian government. Enlightenment came two weeks later when the indictment was unsealed. Prosecutors accused Firtash of having bribed officials in India with more than $18.5 million in order to gain access to titanium resources which in turn he was planning to sell to Boeing. The aircraft giant’s corporate headquarters is in Chicago, and the FBI’s Illinois office was investigating. The indictment showed that the alleged scheme dated back to April 2006, shortly after Firtash’s big win in the post-Orange Revolution gas deal, and had continued for years.
Firtash fought back hard, posting bail of €125 million and issuing a statement to condemn the indictment as absurd. He was being targeted for political reasons, he said, in order to allow US officials to cement their influence over his homeland’s new post-revolutionary government. “I will not allow my reputation to be ruined by those who are driven by political motivations and are not interested in Ukraine and its people,” he said in a line that was hammered home in every interview he and his associates gave, a stance in which he was ably assisted by Lord Bell, the veteran British PR magnate, who now lent his expertise to Firtash, while Robert Shetler-Jones told the Wall Street Journal, “It is not a coincidence that the US is trying to extradite our chairman at the moment when Mr. Firtash is needed for the economic and political reconstruction of Ukraine.”
Apart from bland denials of such accusations, US officials were unable to respond, since they could not risk undermining their case, which is why my source was only prepared to discuss it anonymously. The source insisted that since the indictment had been sealed back in June, long before Ukrainians rose against their president, any suggestion of political motivation was absurd. The long delay in issuing the arrest warrant had been entirely a result of waiting for Firtash to fly to a country which might be prepared to extradite him. The US has no extradition treaty with Ukraine, so he couldn’t be arrested at home, and previous attempts to extradite suspects from the UK had convinced them there was little prospect of bringing him to Chicago from London either. “Look at Julian Assange. Whether you agree or disagree with what his crimes are, it’s been, what, ten years? The sheikh who was part of 9/11 planning, he took years to get to the US,” the source said. “The only other option was France, and they’re even worse than the UK. We only had a few places we could go to, because he only went to a few places, so the choice we had was Austria.”
And the suggestion that the case was political? “We don’t ever do cases based on political motivation. I can’t speak for counter-intelligence, but on the criminal side we have to put all of this into a court, and you can’t hide that if it’s politically motivated. That’s a big frustration.”
For a little while Firtash’s absorption into British high society continued, despite his arrest. In mid-March Cambridge held a ceremony to welcome Lada Firtash into its Guild of Benefactors, but press coverage was hostile, and protesters greeted her car as it arrived at the venue. The university announced that it would place the most recent donation from the Firtashes in a bank account, and would only spend it if he was acquitted. It also promised to improve checks on the provenance of donations. The Ministry of Defense was also challenged over why it had been prepared to sell him the Brompton Road ghost station, and similarly struggled to answer.
“The site was sold on the open market to achieve best value for money for the taxpayer, and we were not aware of the FBI investigation into Mr. Firtash at the point of sale. The sale followed all guidelines set out by the Treasury, and the MoD is satisfied that all legal checks were carried out,” a spokesman said. In Parliament a minister explained what those checks consisted of: “all funds were paid to the MoD through UK regulated solicitors, in accordance with normal practice, to ensure that appropriate financial checks were made on their client.”
The fact that US authorities were investigating Firtash’s companies had been reported in the press years previously, so this was not a convincing argument. The British government’s focus had been on making as much money as possible, and it had actually subcontracted its checks on the origin of that money to Firtash’s own lawyers while ignoring anything that stood in the way of closing the sale. It wasn’t a good look, and it left the MPs and peers who had so willingly accepted the money with some explaining to do. Many of the details about what Firtash has done in the UK are known thanks to Helen Goodman, a Labor MP who became the party’s expert on Ukraine and got to know several of the country’s human rights and anti-corruption activists as a result. She said that parliamentarians involved in the BUS had offered to pay for her to go to Kyiv, saying the money came from “somebody in oil and gas,” but she turned the offer down and arranged her own transport. “It was just obvious that Firtash was corrupting Ukrainian politics, and equally clear that Firtash has an agenda. Why did he want to buy British politicians as well as Ukrainian politicians? What was his agenda? That’s the thing that bothered me. What was he trying to hide?” she told me. “The thing seemed to stink. Every aspect of it seemed really weird.”
Asquith did not respond to my many emails or phone calls, and neither did Lord Risby. One parliamentarian involved in the British Ukrainian Society did agree to talk to me, provided I didn’t identify them in any way, but seemed ignorant about the fact that Firtash was involved in creating the BUS. “You might say I’m a bit of a useful idiot, but this didn’t occur to me,” the individual said. I’m still not sure if that is better or worse than getting involved in full knowledge of where the funding came from.
A politician who was prepared to talk to me on the record was John Whittingdale, a Conservative MP to whom I emailed a list of questions and who then rang me up just after I arrived for lunch at my in-laws’ golf club. Whittingdale did not end his connection to the BUS until long after Firtash’s arrest and accepted more than £3,000 in donations to fund a trip to a 2015 conference held in Vienna and addressed by Firtash. A contemporary statement on Firtash’s website made much of the fact that Whittingdale had attended, and I asked Whittingdale—who at the time of our conversation was culture minister in the UK government, but at the time of the conference was just a backbench MP—whether he wasn’t concerned that his involvement had given Firtash a degree of credibility that he otherwise would have lacked.
“Do you think so? I’m not sure that it gives him much credibility. Goodness, one meets a lot of people. Just meeting them I don’t think enables them to claim any credit. I was briefly director of the BUS, but it is very much an arm’s length operation,” he said. “I am aware of the support for Oxford University, or Cambridge, whichever it is. That’s a matter for them … We are a free society, and as long as it’s legal it’s up to them.”
And the Tube station? Wasn’t he worried about potentially tainted money being used to buy property from the British government? “That’s not a bribe or anything, it’s a commercial transaction. I am dimly aware that he did buy a Tube station somewhere in west London to turn it into a property or something, I don’t know the detail at all. At the moment he’s sitting in Austria somewhere, but there are much more dodgy—” He stopped and appeared to reconsider what he was about to say. “If Ukrainians come and produce evidence for instance that his money had been illegally acquired, or stolen from the people, then obviously that would be something we should look into, and if so then take action over. But as far as I’m aware they haven’t, and there are plenty of other oligarchs who have money in London … Nobody in Ukraine has ever expressed any concern about this.”
He was a government minister with a country to run, and I had lunch waiting, so we ended our conversation there, but that last remark stayed with me because it was so at variance with my own experience. I have spent many months in Ukraine, and almost everyone I talk to expresses concern about Britain giving a safe haven to oligarchs and their money. Whittingdale said Ukrainian prosecutors would have to win a case against Firtash if it wanted Britain to act, but those prosecutors are so demoralized, corrupted and out-resourced that such a victory is an impossible dream (it’s hard enough in Britain, as we will see). Even if they do bring a prosecution, cases from other countries show that the oligarch concerned would simply argue that the proceedings were politically motivated and claim asylum in the UK or another Western country. If an oligarch is not prosecuted, Britain doesn’t investigate; if the oligarch is prosecuted, Britain doesn’t investigate either. The fact that a government minister fails to acknowledge this “Heads they win, tails we lose” injustice helps explain why Britain has consistently failed to interrogate the origin of suspect wealth.
I’m not saying Britain should necessarily have prosecuted Firtash, as the FBI did, but it could easily have been more standoffish. There is plenty of ground between opening criminal proceedings against someone, and welcoming him into your country so enthusiastically that he meets senior royalty and senior parliamentarians and opens trading on the Stock Exchange. It isn’t as if no one in the UK had concerns about the origins of Firtash’s wealth. In 2010 a Conservative politician failed the vetting process for the job of national security adviser, thanks to having accepted money from Shetler-Jones. But that was a rare exception to the general governmental willingness to accept money from anywhere, which has so distinguished Britain since it got started in the butlering business.
In 2020 Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee published a report on Russian influence in the UK. The report failed to gain as much attention as it deserved thanks in part to Prime Minister Boris Johnson dismissing it as an attempt to delegitimize the Brexit referendum. This was a shame because it was a thoughtful analysis of the kind of blind spot that has led Britain to accept money directly from Russian oligarchs, as well as from Russia-allied businessmen like Firtash, without looking into where it comes from. “The inherent tension between the government’s prosperity agenda and the need to protect national security that has led to the current situation has been played out across Whitehall departments,” the report said.
“Prosperity agenda” is another way of saying that the government prioritizes earning money over all other foreign policy concerns, which is what I call being a butler. My source in the United States said that their team had come across this kind of attitude from British counterparts again and again. “‘All of these high-ranking and wealthy people in the UK,’ a police officer said to me a couple of years ago, ‘they only come on vacation.’ And I looked at him and said, ‘What do you think they’re vacationing on? They’re vacationing on stolen money.’ He just says, ‘Well, we can’t make a case on that.’ But the US can, and we’re going to, we put our money where our mouth is.”
As of this being written, which is in the short dark days between Christmas and New Year 2020, Dmitry Firtash is still in Vienna and still battling extradition to the United States. His extradition hearings have bounced between courts, with different Austrian judges ruling different ways, while in Chicago his US-based lawyers have sought to have the whole case thrown out. A number of US citizens have happily taken Firtash’s money to lobby on his behalf, but prosecutors are sticking to their task and still hope he’ll arrive in Chicago eventually.
Ajit Chambers’s business idea has never really recovered from the setback he suffered when he lost the chance to buy the Brompton Road ghost station in 2014, and it’s clear money is tighter for him than it was in the days when he was badgering Boris Johnson at public event after public event. He spoke to me at length for this chapter, but then said I couldn’t use his words unless I paid him, which is a shame because what he told me was interesting and I would have liked to have quoted him. It is hard not to regret Chambers’s failure to take control of the ghost on Brompton Road and turn it into an eccentric cultural venue. The old station has been shuttered since Firtash took possession, a forlorn monument to his ambitions, like a dead dolphin washed up on a beach, a smelly and rotting reminder of how high the tide once was.
Britain’s failure to do anything about Firtash’s property empire was clearly an issue chewing away at my American source because after our conversation had moved on they told me a story about a case their team had worked on, years before, when a woman from a religious congregation blew the whistle on a fellow believer who was making money from financial crime. The woman had apparently gone to the leader of the congregation and explained the situation, saying that the fraudster should be expelled, but he had taken no action. The victims of the crimes were non-believers, so he didn’t care about what was happening to them. “I feel like that’s the way Britain treats people like Firtash. He’s committing crimes, but he’s not committing crimes against UK citizens, so no one cares.”
Not only does no one care now, but no one has cared for a long time. Indifference is not simply a passing phenomenon, but something deeply embedded in how British institutions are structured, in how they work and in what capabilities they have. It’s not just that Britain didn’t investigate Firtash, it’s not clear that it would have been able had it wanted to. After all, there is no profit to be had by turning away a client, and a clever butler wants to minimize any chance of that ever happening. And that’s the topic I want to turn to next.