Posts Tagged ‘berezovsky’

03
April 2013

Boris Berezovsky and the Russian Money Problem

National Post

Boris Berezovsky, once one of the richest men in Russia, was found dead last Saturday at his house in Ascot, a wealthy little English town near Windsor Castle.

Everything about the death suggests suicide. Berezovsky’s body was found inside a locked bathroom. An inquest has found no signs of violence on his body. The ligature around his neck corresponded to a fragment of ligature still attached to the shower curtain.

The 67-year-old Berezovsky had suffered financially from his prolonged conflict with Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin. In the past three years, he appears to have lost the remainder of his fortune. In 2011, a British court had ordered him to pay a huge settlement — rumored at 100-million pounds — to one of his ex-wives. Only last year he had been ordered to pay costs of 35-million pounds after losing a lawsuit against another Russian tycoon. He was reported to have sold artworks and houses to raise cash. Friends described him as “depressed.”

On the other hand … sudden death seems to have become contagious among Putin’s critics. Berezovsky had been friends with Alexander Litvinenko, the ex-spy who died of radiation poisoning in the United Kingdom in 2006 after somehow ingesting a dose of deadly polonium. In 2008, Berezovsky’s 52-year-old former business partner, Badri Patarkatsishvili, dropped dead at his home in Surrey, apparently of cardiac arrest. Well, he was a smoker.

The deaths of these ex-oligarchs will loose few tears. The friends and family of the American journalist Paul Klebnikov — murdered in Moscow in 2004 — suspect Berezovsky of ordering the hit. Berezovsky and Patarkatsishvili gained their fortunes by seizing assets of the former Soviet state in the disorder after the collapse of communism in the early 1990s.

But the second wave of oligarchs brought to wealth and power by their alliance with Vladimir Putin hardly constitute a moral improvement over the first. They are plundering the Russian state, too, this time in alliance with the former KGB — the spy agency Putin headed and whose leading members have become billionaires alongside him.

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25
March 2013

Putin Needs an Enemy After Berezovsky’s Death

Daily Beast

After Boris Berezovsky’s death, Vladimir Putin has a problem—who will play the villain to make him look like a superhero? Peter Pomerantsev reports.

If Vladimir Putin didn’t have exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky as an enemy, the joke over the last decade in Moscow went, he would have needed to invent him. In the Kremlin narrative Berezovsky was the ideal caricature Penguin to Putin’s Batman: the evil Jewish schemer in his London palace looking to usurp good blonde Tsar Vlad. Whenever Putin had a problem state media would pin it on Berezovsky: Chechen terrorists have kidnapped a school in the Caucuses? Berezovsky is behind it. Pussy Riot? Berezovsky stooges.

Berezovsky became the symbol of the ideology Putin was presented as the antithesis of: the representative of the wild ’90s of oligarchs and Yeltsin and destitution, as opposed to the “stable” Putin era. Berezovsky was always the perfect foil, reveling in his role as the great schemer, claiming from his London exile he was behind the revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia, that he would do anything to get rid of Putin. For the last half decade at least, once his last allies in the Russian parliament had been sidelined, it’s unclear whether he had much influence left in Russia at all. So both sides played along: the Kremlin pretending Berezovsky was an all-powerful master of darkness, the other continuing to act as if he were.

There were always rumors, typically conspiratorial for Moscow, that Berezovsky was in fact working with Putin, the two playing out their roles in a choreographed dance. This is hugely dubious, but there was something distinctly theatrical about their sparring, two sides of one performance. Now Berezovsky is dead the Kremlin is faced with a problem: Who will fill the role of uber-baddie to Putin’s goodie?
The easiest thing would be to pluck another exiled oligarch out of the sin bin. Vladimir Gusinsky, the exiled 1990s media magnate, is still around. Jailed oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s allies are still at liberty in the West and make no secret of their grudge against the Kremlin. The problem for Putin is that his narrative as the brave warrior against oligarchical corruption has broken down. His rule is perceived to be just as, if not more, corrupt than the ’90s. His parliamentary party, United Russia, is nicknamed the “party of crooks and thieves.” Tales of his and his best friends’ yachts and castles are ubiquitous.

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02
April 2012

“Londongrad” on edge after attack on Russian banker

Reuters

A failed hit on a former Russian banker in London has sent a chill through Russian immigrant circles and shone an unwelcome spotlight on a hidden criminal underworld encroaching on the British capital.

The shooting also raised concerns Britain might be turning into a playground for Russian mobsters as gangland violence appears to spill over Russian borders into European capitals.

London is the chosen home for many Russians seeking a haven from the cut-throat world of their homeland where, 20 years after the Soviet collapse, they have little faith in the rule of law.

Now, some exiles say, few are safe in a city known affectionately as “Londongrad” to many of its Russian inhabitants.

“Everybody is trying to figure out who their enemies might be,” said Yevgeny Chichvarkin, a business tycoon who fled to London in 2008 after falling out with the government.

“You know, if they want to kill me, they’ll kill me,” added Chichvarkin, whose mother died in mysterious circumstances in Moscow in 2010.

To some, it was like a classic tale of gangland thuggery, with echoes of the plot from some mafia thriller.

German Gorbuntsov, 45, was shot five times with a pistol by a lone gunman as he entered a block of serviced apartments in east London on March 20, the Canary Wharf financial district’s cluster of skyscrapers towering high above the quiet back street.

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30
November 2011

Russia Declares Litvinenko Murder Suspect a Victim

Wall Street Journal

In a new twist of Cold War-style tit-for-tat accusations, Russia asserted Wednesday that Britain’s chief suspect in the poisoning of Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko in 2006 was himself the target of a murder attempt with the same radioactive substance.

The declaration by Russia’s top investigative body, the Investigative Committee, is likely to deepen the diplomatic chill between Moscow and London, and widen the gulf between Russian and western law enforcement agencies.

Russian investigators have appeared recalcitrant in the Livtinenko case, and the government has refused to extradite the polonium suspect, Andrei Lugovoi, calling it a matter of national sovereignty.

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