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Boris Berezovsky
Boris Berezovsky, who has died aged 67, was the most prominent and colourful of the so-called oligarchs, the group of powerful Russian businessmen who grew rich from the wholesale privatisation of state assets that followed the collapse of Soviet Communism.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/9950088/Boris-Berezovsky.html
A poster depicts left to right: Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin Gennady Zyuganov, Vasily Shandybin and, in an insult to the Communists, controversial tycoon Boris Berezovsky. The poster reads: 'Walking together congratulate Comrade Zyuganov and his comrades with the 10th anniversary of the Communist Party of the Russian Fedetation'
Berezovsky’s transformation in little more than a decade from a Soviet
mathematics professor and systems analyst earning 500 roubles (£12.18) a
month to a multibillionaire, was one of the most extraordinary and revealing
stories of the immediate post-Communist era.
He rose to power in the early-1990s by diligently cultivating Boris Yeltsin
and his influential daughter Tatyana Dyachenko. As the Russian president and
his advisers struggled to get a grip on Russia’s bankrupt economy,
Berezovsky showed great financial skill as well as the ability to charm and
manipulate. Thus he became the king of Kremlin intrigue, regarded by his
many enemies as a latter-day Rasputin.
From the shattered remnants of the Soviet Union, he emerged as one of a group
of seven businessmen who oversaw and influenced the break-up of Russia’s
state sector, securing the lion’s share of the spoils for themselves.
Berezovsky’s particular prizes were the airline Aeroflot, the Siberian oil
company Sibneft and a 49 per cent stake in the state television station ORT,
which he used to ensure Yeltsin’s re-election as president in 1996. By the
end of the process, Berezovsky and his oligarch colleagues owned well over
half of Russia’s entire GDP.
Boris Berezovsky, right, with Russian ex-KGB agent Andrei Lugovoy
(Reuters)
Berezovsky’s success had little to do with the market economics in which he
professed to believe. He simply used his powers of persuasion, his political
contacts and his ability to grant personal favours to turn the cash flow of
former state enterprises his way. “Privatisation in Russia goes through
three stages”, he explained in 1995. “First, the privatisation of profit;
second, privatisation of property; third, the privatisation of debt.
Aeroflot is now going through the intermediate stage between privatisation
of profit and property. We want to take part in both.”
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Physically Berezovsky bore a passing resemblance to his fellow billionaire,
the Italian media mogul and Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, and he shared
Berlusconi’s undeniable charm, taste for the good life and shady business
reputation. Above all, however, he shared Berlusconi’s interest in political
power. But while Berlusconi tapped into something deep in the Italian
psyche, Berezovsky was regarded with hatred and suspicion by ordinary
Russians who blamed him for their country’s parlous economic condition. In
1994 Berezovsky’s chauffeur had his head blown off by a bomb intended for
his employer, who walked away from the explosion unscathed. The explosion
did, however, introduce Berezovsky to a young agent of the FSB, successor
organisation to the KGB, who was assigned to investigate: Alexander
Litvinenko.
Berezovsky went on to support Vladimir Putin in his bid to become Russian
president in 2000, funding the pro-Kremlin, pro-Putin Unity party and
churning out pro-Putin propaganda on ORT. But his arrogance proved his
undoing. In response to public anger and to secure his own position, Putin
turned on his former backer, turfing him out of a state-owned country
estate, and demanding back government number plates that Berezovsky used on
his fleet of cars. In 2001 Berezovsky fled to France, then later to Britain,
pursued by allegations of fraud and corruption.
Boris Berezovsky was born in Moscow on January 23 1946 into a Russian Jewish
family. His father, Abram, was a civil engineer and his mother, Anna Gelman,
a nurse. He studied Forestry and Mathematics at the Moscow Forestry
Engineering Institute and took a doctorate in 1984 on the “theory of
optimising and decision making”. He went on to become a professor, earning a
wide reputation.
His commercial career began in the 1980s when he went into business, importing
computer software from the west; but it was the end of the Soviet Union that
made him. As Communist controls crumbled, he saw a chance to exploit the
difference in price between cars sold cheaply for export and those sold in
the home market. He established the Logovaz car dealership, which allowed
him to sell off Russian-made Ladas at a profit. Logovaz evolved into a
mammoth financial and business conglomerate and made Berezovsky a
multi-millionaire.
Berezovsky met Boris Yeltsin in 1993, and soon established a mutually
beneficial relationship with the Russian president and his circle. He
subsidised the publication of Yeltsin’s biography and established a strong
friendship with Yeltsin’s daughter, Tatyana Dyachenko, and his chief of
staff, Valentin Yumashev, winning himself a key role in the Kremlin
decision-making machine. Within two years Berezovsky had acquired his stake
in ORT and bought the potentially lucrative Sibneft oil company for just
$100 million.
He came to public prominence in 1996 when Yeltsin, who had slumped to just six
per cent approval ratings in the polls, was embarking on what seemed a
doomed re-election bid. Berezovsky mobilised his fellow oligarchs to provide
millions of dollars in finance and organised a ruthlessly professional
campaign with rock concerts and glossy advertising which crippled the
opposition and rescued Yeltsin from defeat, although it brought on two heart
attacks.
Boris Yeltsin, left, presents Boris Berezovsky as new executive secretary
of the Commonwealth of Independent States in Apri 1998 (AP)
The oligarchs extorted a heavy price for their support. They received shares
in the most valuable state-owned companies as security against loans they
made to the state budget in an infamous “loans for shares” scheme. After
Yeltsin won the election, these companies were put up for auction and the
oligarchs divided them among themselves. In 1997 Berezovsky acquired
Aeroflot. The same year, Forbes magazine named him the ninth most powerful
entrepreneur in the world, with a fortune worth $3bn.
Rich and powerful, Berezovsky exerted ever greater influence on the unhealthy
and increasingly confused president, who awarded him a Kremlin job as deputy
secretary of the Security Council. Effectively, Berezovsky became the
Kremlin’s man dealing with the breakaway republic of Chechnya, where a
ceasefire had been agreed after 20 months of war. He helped forge the deal
that had Aslan Maskhadov elected as Chechen president and Russia promise
economic aid, although his detractors claimed his real interest was in
getting his hands on the region’s oil. Maskhadov himself later claimed that
Berezovsky had helped to finance warlords Shamil Basayev and Khattab in
their separatist campaign. In 1998 his contacts in Chechnya enabled him to
secure the release of two British men held hostages by Chechen rebels.
His appointment as executive secretary of the Commonwealth of Independent
States (CIS) - a loose league of 12 former Soviet republics - in 1997
carried little official weight but was another clear sign of his power. One
Russian cartoonist depicted him as a black devil looking over the
president’s shoulder.
It is hard to pinpoint the exact moment at which it all began to turn sour,
but a raid by police on the offices of an obscure Moscow security firm in
July 1998 might have marked a turning point. Among an arsenal of bugging
devices, scanners and cameras, police found a library of video and audio
cassettes reaped from years of snooping on top people, including members of
Yeltsin’s family. The owner of the firm was Berezovsky. As a result of the
raid, the bedrock of Berezovsky’s power - his access to the Kremlin - was
shaken.
Details of the raid leaked onto newspaper front pages. Acting on instructions
from the prosecutor general, Yuri Skuratov, police went on to raid other
companies linked to Berezovsky. At first Berezovksy’s allies in the Yeltsin
administration and law enforcement agencies tried to brush over the affair
by forcing the prosecutor-general to resign - a lurid video of Skuratov
having sex with two prostitutes was leaked, with extracts shown on
prime-time television.
But the Russian parliament rallied behind Skuratov. He stayed in place, and
launched an anti-corruption investigation. In 1999 an arrest warrant was
issued for Berezovsky in connection with alleged profits skimming at
Aeroflot, but was subsequently dropped.
Meanwhile Berezovsky had transferred his political allegiance to the up and
coming Vladimir Putin, Yeltsin’s prime minister. Putin’s presidential
victory, in March 2000, was largely secured during campaigning for the
parliamentary elections of December 1999, when a ferocious smear campaign on
ORT television effectively eliminated his two main rivals. In a series of
popular news shows, Moscow’s mayor Yuri Luzhkov was portrayed as a murderous
con-man, while gory footage of a hip operation was broadcast to demonstrate
that the former Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov (who had recently undergone
surgery) was not up to the job. The parliamentary elections also saw
Berezovsky elected as representative for the region of Karachevo-Cherkess,
securing him immunity from prosecution.
Boris Berezovsky leaves Bow Street Magistarates wearing a President Putin
mask in 2003 (Geoff Pugh)
Yet the honeymoon with Putin was short-lived. During his election campaign,
Putin gained popular support by promising to crack down on the oligarchs,
and in June 2000 he instigated criminal investigations against many of those
who had flourished under his predecessor. Berezovsky was a particular target
since he had used his media empire to criticise Putin over his handling of
the war in Chechnya and the Kursk submarine disaster. In July 2000 he
resigned from his seat in parliament in protest at “authoritarian trends”
within Putin’s government.
In 2001, as investigations proceeded, Berezovsky fled to France, then to
London, where he sought to reinvent himself as a champion of liberal
democratic values. The irony did not go unremarked in Russia. Berezovsky
professed to be immune to public cynicism about his motives. “I just hope to
help people,” he said.
In 2002, the Russian authorities issued an arrest warrant on charges of
money-laundering and illegal business activity. Berezovsky sought to resist
moves to extradite him the following year, claiming to be a martyr to an
“utterly corrupt” legal system, and arguing, more persuasively, that his
life would be in danger if he returned.
In 2004, rumours swirled that Berezovsky had helped to finance Ukraine’s
Orange Revolution, which ushered in a government in Kiev determined to break
free of Moscow’s influence. Then, in 2006, Alexander Litvinenko, who had
begun working for Berezovsky, and whom Berezovsky had helped to escape to
London in 2000, died after being poisoned with radioactive polonium at a
London hotel. He accused Putin of his murder.
But the coup de grace was yet to come. In 2007 Berezovsky served a writ on the
Chelsea football club owner Roman Abramovich, whom he had first met on a
fellow oligarch’s yacht in 1995. Abramovich, one of the richest and most
private men in the world, was accused of blackmailing Berezovsky into
selling-off his interests both in Sibneft and an aluminium company for a
fraction of their true worth.
Abramovich in turn claimed that between 1995 and 2002 he had paid Berezovsky
$1.3bn not for any oil or metal stakes, but to buy political protection.
When in 2012 the Chelsea owner won what turned out to be the biggest private
court case in British history, it was a devastating blow to Berezovsky,
financially and psychologically.
By the time of the verdict his billions were under assault from those in his
personal life too. In 2011 he paid what was, at the time, the biggest
divorce settlement in history, believed to be worth hundreds of millions, to
his ex-wife Galina Besharova. Then, this January, his former lover Elena
Gorbunova began legal proceedings claiming that she, too, was owed millions.
A request by Berezovsky to impose “total privacy” on early rounds of his
battle with Gorbunova was rejected by a High Court judge in January this
year.
Mr Justice Mann, presiding over the case, described Berezovsky as a “man under
financial pressure”. And this week Berezovsky made headlines when it emerged
that he was attempting to sell a limited edition Andy Warhol portrait of
Lenin at Christie’s. The portrait was valued at up to £50,000.
With his once vast fortune and influence fast dwindling to nothing, Berezovsky
cut an increasingly isolated figure at his home in Surrey, where the phalanx
of former French foreign legionaries which once served as his close
protection team had been whittled down to a single bodyguard. It was that
bodyguard who reportedly found Berezovsky’s body, and though police sent in
teams specialised in handling radioactive substances, the property was
quickly given the all clear.
Boris Berezovsky had two children with his first wife, Nina. In 1991 he
married Galina Besharova, with whom he also had two children. The marriage
was dissolved in 2010. He also had two children with his partner Elena
Gorbunova.
Boris Berezovsky, born January 23 1946, died March 23 2013
Таймс:
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article3721815.ece
Russian businessman whose influence grew after the break-up of the Soviet Union but who fled from President Putin to come to the UK
Boris Berezovsky was a Soviet mathematician who after the fall of Communism accumulated enormous wealth and political influence. He skimmed huge profits from Russia’s largest state-owned carmaker and controlled Moscow’s powerful ORT television and other sectors of the Soviet economy including Aeroflot, the Russian airline.
He was a close ally of President Boris Yeltsin and launched a ruthless television campaign that ensured the latter’s re-election. At the height of his influence he also became Yeltsin’s Deputy National Security Adviser.
With Yeltsin’s career fading, he became kingmaker in supporting the rise of Vladimir Putin, an obscure KGB agent, to become President in 2000. But the two soon fell out when Putin began a campaign of tax claims against Yeltsin’s oligarchs, including Berezovsky and Mikhail Khordokovsky, the oil tycoon who remains in prison. Berezovsky became a particular target because he had begun to criticise Putin over his handling of the war in Chechnya and the Kursk submarine disaster.
In 2002, faced with criminal investigations on charges of money laundering and illegal business activity, Berezovsky fled to France and then Britain. The refusal of the British Government to extradite him to Russia and the granting of political asylum caused a significant breach in Anglo-Russian relations. In exile in Britain, Berezovsky became a leading critic of the Putin presidency and was convicted in absentia of economic crimes. He was convinced that the Kremlin wanted to get rid of him.
Berezovsky helped Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian security official who exposed corruption in the Russian security apparatus, to flee Russia in 2000. On the day that he was poisoned in 2006, Litvinenko went from a meeting in a London hotel to Berezovsky’s nearby office where he met the Chechen exiled leader Akhmed Zakayev, another of Berezovsky’s protégés. Shortly afterwards Litvinenko died of radiation poisoning - believed to have been carried out by the FSB, the KGB’s successor.
Berezovsky had no shortage of enemies - most notably President Putin - and was twice the target of assassination attempts, including a bomb that decapitated his chauffeur and a foiled attempt to kill him in the Park Lane Hilton. Latterly he lost one of the largest private lawsuits in history in a dispute with Roman Abramovich. He accused the Chelsea Football Club owner of blackmail and breach of trust, claiming that Abramovich had “intimidated” him into selling shares in a Russian company for a fraction of their value. He lost his £3 billion claim last year and was described by the judge, Mrs Justice Gloster, as “an unimpressive and inherently unreliable witness”.
His legal troubles worsened with a claim by his former girlfriend Elena Gorbunova for £5 million from the sale of the house they owned. The judge also ordered him to pay £35 million of Mr Abramovich’s legal fees. It was recently reported that Berezovsky had begun to sell personal assets, including a yacht and a painting by Andy Warhol, in order to pay his debts.
Boris Abramovich Berezovsky was born to Jewish parents in Moscow in 1946. His father, Abram Markovich, was a construction engineer from Tomsk, and his mother, Anna Aleksandrovna, worked in the Paediatric Institute of the Soviet Academy of Medical Sciences. He finished school in 1962 and enrolled in the Moscow Forestry Institute’s recently opened electronics and digital technology faculty, graduating in 1967. In 1969 he started work as a junior engineer at the Soviet Union’s Moscow-based Hydrometerological Scientific Research Centre before moving to the Academy of Science’s Institute of Management Problems. Until 1989 he worked in Moscow State University as a respected academic, publishing widely.
He started working with AvtoVAZ (the Soviet car production organisation) in 1973, but it was not until the fall of the Soviet Union and its command economy that the job became a means to make a fortune. Like much of Soviet industry, the overstaffed car factory run by AvtoVAZ produced poor-quality goods very inefficiently. Berezovsky suggested setting up a company in Switzerland which would be a joint venture with AvtoVAZ, thus encouraging and enabling foreign investment. It also enabled Berezovsky to reap vast profits for himself. By the mid-1990s, he was one of the more notorious beneficiaries of the fiscal and legal chaos that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. He was said to be the first man in Moscow to own a Mercedes.
Berezovsky developed a broad business profile. From selling and importing cars he moved into banking and media ownership. From 1994 to 1996 he led the council of directors of “ORTV-Russian National TV” and was a shareholder in “Moscow Independent Broadcasting Corporation”.
The privatisation of Soviet industry amounted in effect to the assetstripping of an entire nation. It was a cut-throat business, in which corruption, fraud and violence played significant roles. It brought untold wealth to a fortunate or unscrupulous few, but it was not without its hazards. Berezovsky became a target for assassination. He in turn was to be questioned by law enforcement agencies in connection with at least one murder.
Political patronage was the key to Berezovsky’s success. General Alexander Korzhakov, Boris Yeltsin’s aide and Presidential Security Service head, had supported Berezovsky in the early 1990s, helping him in the acquisition of state-owned assets. Berezovsky had actively wooed the political elite, in 1993 offering to publish Yeltsin’s second book in Finland, at his own expense. Although the book spectacularly failed to sell, Berezovsky had negotiated an extravagant advance, which he invested wisely, and the President remained unaware that the income he received was from the soundly invested advance rather than worldwide book sales. It may not have been the deciding factor in the development of such close relations between Berezovsky and the Yeltsin regime, but it certainly oiled the wheels of friendship. The support of Berezovsky’s media empire proved vital to Yeltsin in the 1996 election.
Berezovsky had access to the highest levels of Russia’s political and security elite, but his influence was not limited to those who held constitutional positions. Yeltsin’s regime became notorious for its nepotism and corruption. Known as The Family, there was a close circle of advisers, friends and relatives, all of whom reaped heavy fiscal reward from the continued activity in office of the ever more weary-looking Yeltsin. Yeltsin’s daughter, Tatyana Dyachenko, was at the heart of it, and exerted real political influence over her father. Berezovsky gave her gifts including cars and jewellery.
By 1996 Berezovskyhad added the oil company SibNeft to his business concerns. The following year Forbes estimated he was worth $3 billion. His wealth went hand in hand with a growing involvement in politics. In 1997 he led a campaign to free Russian TV journalists who had been taken hostage by Chechen fighters. And in May 1997 he helped to organise the signing of the international declaration of peace between the Russian Federation and the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria. In November he was appointed adviser to Valentin Yumashev, head of the Presidential Administration.
He had his enemies, however. In November 1997 the two first Deputy Prime Ministers, Anatoly Chubais and Boris Nemtsov, called for Berezovsky to be removed from his position on the National Security Council. Yeltsin conceded. In May 1998 Berezovsky was sacked from his position as adviser to the head of the Presidential Administration. Later that year, an open letter he had written to the man who was then director of the FSB, Vladimir Putin, was published in the Russian newspaper Kommersant Daily. In it Berezovsky voiced fears of an assassination attempt against him. Five months later the Russian Prosecutor General ordered that he be detained. Charges against him included money-laundering and corruption.
Although it seemed his star was on the wane, he continued to be a significant player. In December 1999 he was elected as a deputy to the State Duma, Russia’s parliament, and he served as an independent non-party affiliated parliamentarian, hoping to exploit the immunity from prosecution it afforded.
A spectacular falling-out with Yeltsin and his associates led to a series of security service raids on Berezovsky’s businesses and accusations of extortion, espionage and fraud. Nonetheless, Berezovsky supported Yeltsin’s nominated heir Vladimir Putin, attempting to regain the political influence he had held. Putin, however, was suspicious of the wealthy businessmen who had bought their places at the centre of the Russian political machine. Realising that the game was up, in late 2000 Berezovsky moved to the UK, just as fraud and corruption charges were being drawn up against him in Moscow.
From his residences in London and Surrey, Berezovsky funded opposition to Putin, and publicised Russian state abuses of power. His allies in London included Ahmad Zakaev, a Chechen warlord wanted in Moscow for links to terrorism, and Alexander Litvinenko, whose death has prompted a cold spell in Russian-British relations.
Berezovsky was one of Putin’s most vocal and consistent critics. This won him admiration among British liberals, and an ever-growing list of enemies in Russia. He taunted Moscow regularly and gave interviews to the British press declaring his readiness to support a violent overthrow of the Russian regime.
It was Berezovsky who first pointed to the London murder of Alexander Litvinenko as being an act prepared in Moscow at the highest levels. Moscow retaliated with accusations voiced by a spy suspect in the Litvinenko case, Andrei Lugovoi, that Berezovsky was running a spy recruitment ring for MI6, and helping to manufacture false claims for political asylum in Britain for wealthy Russians.
He is survived by two children from his relationship with Elena Gorbunova and by two children from his first marriage and two from his second.
Boris Berezovsky, Russian businessman, was born on January 23, 1946. He was found dead on March 23, 2013, aged 67
Ще стаття в Таймс
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/uk/article3721683.ece
The night before Boris Bereszovsky was found dead, he was sitting in a Park Lane hotel dressed all in black and struggling to control a shaking hand.
He was “very depressed and very lost” as he drank tea with honey in the Four Seasons with a Russian journalist. Friends of Ilya Zhegulyov, a correspondent who had known Mr Berezovsky for years, said that the exiled oligarch, 67, looked like a mourner. He put his right hand on the table or against his body but could not stop the shaking. Less than 24 hours later, Mr Berezovsky was found slumped dead on the floor in a bathroom at his mansion in Ascot, Berkshire. He had been living alone for several months.
His bodyguard broke down the door at about 3pm on Saturday, concerned that he had not seen Mr Bereszovsky since his return from London.
Police said they were trying to “gain a better understanding” of the businessman’s state of mind in his final days and indicated that they thought he had killed himself. Detective Chief Inspector Kevin Brown of Thames Valley Police said: “We do not have evidence to suggest third party involvement.”
However, given the dead man’s association with the murdered ex-KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko and the history of attempts on his life in Moscow and London, police are continuing to investigate. MI5 and Scotland Yard’s anti-terror unit have been kept informed and it is understood that samples from Mr Berezovsky’s body will be sent to the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston for analysis.
Scientists there discovered that Mr Litvinenko had been poisoned in 2006 with radioactive polonium 210.
Mr Berezovsky’s friend said he had been depressed after losing a court battle with Roman Abramovich, the Chelsea FC owner, in October. His assets had been frozen after he and Helena Gorbunova separated in December.
“I don’t think there was any reason for the Russians to kill Boris - he was destroyed six months ago by the British courts,” said Alex Goldfarb, a longtime friend. “That was a huge victory for \ Putin. Boris was effectively taken out of the picture. He had started smoking again, he was drinking, he had stopped enjoying life. He was under tremendous stress.” Lord Bell, Mr Berezovsky’s PR spokesman, said: “I saw him last two weeks ago and he was very depressed, very low.”
Mr Berezovsky’s finances were in a parlous state and he was living behind high fences and barbed-wire in Titness Park House, a chateau-style residence overlooking Windsor Great Park.
An ambulance was called to the property by the guard at 3.23pm and Mr Berezovsky was pronounced dead at the scene. Specialist officers were called in after a paramedic’s personal radiation monitor device went off. The area was given the all-clear yesterday morning and South Central Ambulance Service said that normal environmental factors might have triggered the alert.
A post-mortem examination is likely to begin today. Amid reports that a scarf was found next to Mr Beresovsky’s body, Nikolai Glushkov, another friend, told the Guardian: “Boris was strangled. Either he did it himself or with the help of someone. I don’t believe it was suicide. This was not just a normal death.”
Mr Berezovsky had six children, the youngest of whom is 15, and grandchildren. The family has asked police to withhold some details about the death until younger relatives have been spoken to.
Mr Brown said: “We are at the early stages of the investigation and we are retaining an open mind as we progress. We are focused on conducting a thorough investigation as we would with any unexplained death.”
Neighbours in Ascot say they rarely saw Mr Berezovsky, or any of the other wealthy Russians now living in the area. One man said he was once approached by bodyguards when trimming his hedge. “They won’t tell us the names of the Russians. They’re hardly ever here. One of them only travels in by helicopter. They’re all paranoid.”
In his final political conversation before his death, Mr Berezovsky had spoken about his deep desire to return to Russia and how he had lost faith in the opposition to President Putin. He is said to have expressed the feeling that he had underestimated the Russian leader by thinking that he could overthrow him. He felt that President Putin was too powerful to be defeated.
Mr Berezovsky also spoke of having had “many disappointments” in his life in London and of feeling that there was “no point” to his life. A friend of Mr Zhegulyov said that Mr Berezovsky had told the Forbes Magazine journalist: “I don’t want to be involved in politics. I don’t know what to do. I’m 67 years old. And I don’t know what I should do.”
The dead man’s associates in London cast doubt, however, on claims from the Kremlin that he was negotiating with officials to return home. President Putin’s spokesman said the Kremlin would not be opposed to considering a request for Mr Berezovsky’s funeral to take place in Moscow.
Boris Berezovsky
Boris Berezovsky, who has died aged 67, was the most prominent and colourful of the so-called oligarchs, the group of powerful Russian businessmen who grew rich from the wholesale privatisation of state assets that followed the collapse of Soviet Communism.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/9950088/Boris-Berezovsky.html
A poster depicts left to right: Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin Gennady Zyuganov, Vasily Shandybin and, in an insult to the Communists, controversial tycoon Boris Berezovsky. The poster reads: 'Walking together congratulate Comrade Zyuganov and his comrades with the 10th anniversary of the Communist Party of the Russian Fedetation'
Berezovsky’s transformation in little more than a decade from a Soviet
mathematics professor and systems analyst earning 500 roubles (£12.18) a
month to a multibillionaire, was one of the most extraordinary and revealing
stories of the immediate post-Communist era.
He rose to power in the early-1990s by diligently cultivating Boris Yeltsin
and his influential daughter Tatyana Dyachenko. As the Russian president and
his advisers struggled to get a grip on Russia’s bankrupt economy,
Berezovsky showed great financial skill as well as the ability to charm and
manipulate. Thus he became the king of Kremlin intrigue, regarded by his
many enemies as a latter-day Rasputin.
From the shattered remnants of the Soviet Union, he emerged as one of a group
of seven businessmen who oversaw and influenced the break-up of Russia’s
state sector, securing the lion’s share of the spoils for themselves.
Berezovsky’s particular prizes were the airline Aeroflot, the Siberian oil
company Sibneft and a 49 per cent stake in the state television station ORT,
which he used to ensure Yeltsin’s re-election as president in 1996. By the
end of the process, Berezovsky and his oligarch colleagues owned well over
half of Russia’s entire GDP.
Boris Berezovsky, right, with Russian ex-KGB agent Andrei Lugovoy
(Reuters)
Berezovsky’s success had little to do with the market economics in which he
professed to believe. He simply used his powers of persuasion, his political
contacts and his ability to grant personal favours to turn the cash flow of
former state enterprises his way. “Privatisation in Russia goes through
three stages”, he explained in 1995. “First, the privatisation of profit;
second, privatisation of property; third, the privatisation of debt.
Aeroflot is now going through the intermediate stage between privatisation
of profit and property. We want to take part in both.”
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Physically Berezovsky bore a passing resemblance to his fellow billionaire,
the Italian media mogul and Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, and he shared
Berlusconi’s undeniable charm, taste for the good life and shady business
reputation. Above all, however, he shared Berlusconi’s interest in political
power. But while Berlusconi tapped into something deep in the Italian
psyche, Berezovsky was regarded with hatred and suspicion by ordinary
Russians who blamed him for their country’s parlous economic condition. In
1994 Berezovsky’s chauffeur had his head blown off by a bomb intended for
his employer, who walked away from the explosion unscathed. The explosion
did, however, introduce Berezovsky to a young agent of the FSB, successor
organisation to the KGB, who was assigned to investigate: Alexander
Litvinenko.
Berezovsky went on to support Vladimir Putin in his bid to become Russian
president in 2000, funding the pro-Kremlin, pro-Putin Unity party and
churning out pro-Putin propaganda on ORT. But his arrogance proved his
undoing. In response to public anger and to secure his own position, Putin
turned on his former backer, turfing him out of a state-owned country
estate, and demanding back government number plates that Berezovsky used on
his fleet of cars. In 2001 Berezovsky fled to France, then later to Britain,
pursued by allegations of fraud and corruption.
Boris Berezovsky was born in Moscow on January 23 1946 into a Russian Jewish
family. His father, Abram, was a civil engineer and his mother, Anna Gelman,
a nurse. He studied Forestry and Mathematics at the Moscow Forestry
Engineering Institute and took a doctorate in 1984 on the “theory of
optimising and decision making”. He went on to become a professor, earning a
wide reputation.
His commercial career began in the 1980s when he went into business, importing
computer software from the west; but it was the end of the Soviet Union that
made him. As Communist controls crumbled, he saw a chance to exploit the
difference in price between cars sold cheaply for export and those sold in
the home market. He established the Logovaz car dealership, which allowed
him to sell off Russian-made Ladas at a profit. Logovaz evolved into a
mammoth financial and business conglomerate and made Berezovsky a
multi-millionaire.
Berezovsky met Boris Yeltsin in 1993, and soon established a mutually
beneficial relationship with the Russian president and his circle. He
subsidised the publication of Yeltsin’s biography and established a strong
friendship with Yeltsin’s daughter, Tatyana Dyachenko, and his chief of
staff, Valentin Yumashev, winning himself a key role in the Kremlin
decision-making machine. Within two years Berezovsky had acquired his stake
in ORT and bought the potentially lucrative Sibneft oil company for just
$100 million.
He came to public prominence in 1996 when Yeltsin, who had slumped to just six
per cent approval ratings in the polls, was embarking on what seemed a
doomed re-election bid. Berezovsky mobilised his fellow oligarchs to provide
millions of dollars in finance and organised a ruthlessly professional
campaign with rock concerts and glossy advertising which crippled the
opposition and rescued Yeltsin from defeat, although it brought on two heart
attacks.
Boris Yeltsin, left, presents Boris Berezovsky as new executive secretary
of the Commonwealth of Independent States in Apri 1998 (AP)
The oligarchs extorted a heavy price for their support. They received shares
in the most valuable state-owned companies as security against loans they
made to the state budget in an infamous “loans for shares” scheme. After
Yeltsin won the election, these companies were put up for auction and the
oligarchs divided them among themselves. In 1997 Berezovsky acquired
Aeroflot. The same year, Forbes magazine named him the ninth most powerful
entrepreneur in the world, with a fortune worth $3bn.
Rich and powerful, Berezovsky exerted ever greater influence on the unhealthy
and increasingly confused president, who awarded him a Kremlin job as deputy
secretary of the Security Council. Effectively, Berezovsky became the
Kremlin’s man dealing with the breakaway republic of Chechnya, where a
ceasefire had been agreed after 20 months of war. He helped forge the deal
that had Aslan Maskhadov elected as Chechen president and Russia promise
economic aid, although his detractors claimed his real interest was in
getting his hands on the region’s oil. Maskhadov himself later claimed that
Berezovsky had helped to finance warlords Shamil Basayev and Khattab in
their separatist campaign. In 1998 his contacts in Chechnya enabled him to
secure the release of two British men held hostages by Chechen rebels.
His appointment as executive secretary of the Commonwealth of Independent
States (CIS) - a loose league of 12 former Soviet republics - in 1997
carried little official weight but was another clear sign of his power. One
Russian cartoonist depicted him as a black devil looking over the
president’s shoulder.
It is hard to pinpoint the exact moment at which it all began to turn sour,
but a raid by police on the offices of an obscure Moscow security firm in
July 1998 might have marked a turning point. Among an arsenal of bugging
devices, scanners and cameras, police found a library of video and audio
cassettes reaped from years of snooping on top people, including members of
Yeltsin’s family. The owner of the firm was Berezovsky. As a result of the
raid, the bedrock of Berezovsky’s power - his access to the Kremlin - was
shaken.
Details of the raid leaked onto newspaper front pages. Acting on instructions
from the prosecutor general, Yuri Skuratov, police went on to raid other
companies linked to Berezovsky. At first Berezovksy’s allies in the Yeltsin
administration and law enforcement agencies tried to brush over the affair
by forcing the prosecutor-general to resign - a lurid video of Skuratov
having sex with two prostitutes was leaked, with extracts shown on
prime-time television.
But the Russian parliament rallied behind Skuratov. He stayed in place, and
launched an anti-corruption investigation. In 1999 an arrest warrant was
issued for Berezovsky in connection with alleged profits skimming at
Aeroflot, but was subsequently dropped.
Meanwhile Berezovsky had transferred his political allegiance to the up and
coming Vladimir Putin, Yeltsin’s prime minister. Putin’s presidential
victory, in March 2000, was largely secured during campaigning for the
parliamentary elections of December 1999, when a ferocious smear campaign on
ORT television effectively eliminated his two main rivals. In a series of
popular news shows, Moscow’s mayor Yuri Luzhkov was portrayed as a murderous
con-man, while gory footage of a hip operation was broadcast to demonstrate
that the former Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov (who had recently undergone
surgery) was not up to the job. The parliamentary elections also saw
Berezovsky elected as representative for the region of Karachevo-Cherkess,
securing him immunity from prosecution.
Boris Berezovsky leaves Bow Street Magistarates wearing a President Putin
mask in 2003 (Geoff Pugh)
Yet the honeymoon with Putin was short-lived. During his election campaign,
Putin gained popular support by promising to crack down on the oligarchs,
and in June 2000 he instigated criminal investigations against many of those
who had flourished under his predecessor. Berezovsky was a particular target
since he had used his media empire to criticise Putin over his handling of
the war in Chechnya and the Kursk submarine disaster. In July 2000 he
resigned from his seat in parliament in protest at “authoritarian trends”
within Putin’s government.
In 2001, as investigations proceeded, Berezovsky fled to France, then to
London, where he sought to reinvent himself as a champion of liberal
democratic values. The irony did not go unremarked in Russia. Berezovsky
professed to be immune to public cynicism about his motives. “I just hope to
help people,” he said.
In 2002, the Russian authorities issued an arrest warrant on charges of
money-laundering and illegal business activity. Berezovsky sought to resist
moves to extradite him the following year, claiming to be a martyr to an
“utterly corrupt” legal system, and arguing, more persuasively, that his
life would be in danger if he returned.
In 2004, rumours swirled that Berezovsky had helped to finance Ukraine’s
Orange Revolution, which ushered in a government in Kiev determined to break
free of Moscow’s influence. Then, in 2006, Alexander Litvinenko, who had
begun working for Berezovsky, and whom Berezovsky had helped to escape to
London in 2000, died after being poisoned with radioactive polonium at a
London hotel. He accused Putin of his murder.
But the coup de grace was yet to come. In 2007 Berezovsky served a writ on the
Chelsea football club owner Roman Abramovich, whom he had first met on a
fellow oligarch’s yacht in 1995. Abramovich, one of the richest and most
private men in the world, was accused of blackmailing Berezovsky into
selling-off his interests both in Sibneft and an aluminium company for a
fraction of their true worth.
Abramovich in turn claimed that between 1995 and 2002 he had paid Berezovsky
$1.3bn not for any oil or metal stakes, but to buy political protection.
When in 2012 the Chelsea owner won what turned out to be the biggest private
court case in British history, it was a devastating blow to Berezovsky,
financially and psychologically.
By the time of the verdict his billions were under assault from those in his
personal life too. In 2011 he paid what was, at the time, the biggest
divorce settlement in history, believed to be worth hundreds of millions, to
his ex-wife Galina Besharova. Then, this January, his former lover Elena
Gorbunova began legal proceedings claiming that she, too, was owed millions.
A request by Berezovsky to impose “total privacy” on early rounds of his
battle with Gorbunova was rejected by a High Court judge in January this
year.
Mr Justice Mann, presiding over the case, described Berezovsky as a “man under
financial pressure”. And this week Berezovsky made headlines when it emerged
that he was attempting to sell a limited edition Andy Warhol portrait of
Lenin at Christie’s. The portrait was valued at up to £50,000.
With his once vast fortune and influence fast dwindling to nothing, Berezovsky
cut an increasingly isolated figure at his home in Surrey, where the phalanx
of former French foreign legionaries which once served as his close
protection team had been whittled down to a single bodyguard. It was that
bodyguard who reportedly found Berezovsky’s body, and though police sent in
teams specialised in handling radioactive substances, the property was
quickly given the all clear.
Boris Berezovsky had two children with his first wife, Nina. In 1991 he
married Galina Besharova, with whom he also had two children. The marriage
was dissolved in 2010. He also had two children with his partner Elena
Gorbunova.
Boris Berezovsky, born January 23 1946, died March 23 2013
Таймс:
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Russian businessman whose influence grew after the break-up of the Soviet Union but who fled from President Putin to come to the UK
Boris Berezovsky was a Soviet mathematician who after the fall of Communism accumulated enormous wealth and political influence. He skimmed huge profits from Russia’s largest state-owned carmaker and controlled Moscow’s powerful ORT television and other sectors of the Soviet economy including Aeroflot, the Russian airline.
He was a close ally of President Boris Yeltsin and launched a ruthless television campaign that ensured the latter’s re-election. At the height of his influence he also became Yeltsin’s Deputy National Security Adviser.
With Yeltsin’s career fading, he became kingmaker in supporting the rise of Vladimir Putin, an obscure KGB agent, to become President in 2000. But the two soon fell out when Putin began a campaign of tax claims against Yeltsin’s oligarchs, including Berezovsky and Mikhail Khordokovsky, the oil tycoon who remains in prison. Berezovsky became a particular target because he had begun to criticise Putin over his handling of the war in Chechnya and the Kursk submarine disaster.
In 2002, faced with criminal investigations on charges of money laundering and illegal business activity, Berezovsky fled to France and then Britain. The refusal of the British Government to extradite him to Russia and the granting of political asylum caused a significant breach in Anglo-Russian relations. In exile in Britain, Berezovsky became a leading critic of the Putin presidency and was convicted in absentia of economic crimes. He was convinced that the Kremlin wanted to get rid of him.
Berezovsky helped Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian security official who exposed corruption in the Russian security apparatus, to flee Russia in 2000. On the day that he was poisoned in 2006, Litvinenko went from a meeting in a London hotel to Berezovsky’s nearby office where he met the Chechen exiled leader Akhmed Zakayev, another of Berezovsky’s protégés. Shortly afterwards Litvinenko died of radiation poisoning - believed to have been carried out by the FSB, the KGB’s successor.
Berezovsky had no shortage of enemies - most notably President Putin - and was twice the target of assassination attempts, including a bomb that decapitated his chauffeur and a foiled attempt to kill him in the Park Lane Hilton. Latterly he lost one of the largest private lawsuits in history in a dispute with Roman Abramovich. He accused the Chelsea Football Club owner of blackmail and breach of trust, claiming that Abramovich had “intimidated” him into selling shares in a Russian company for a fraction of their value. He lost his £3 billion claim last year and was described by the judge, Mrs Justice Gloster, as “an unimpressive and inherently unreliable witness”.
His legal troubles worsened with a claim by his former girlfriend Elena Gorbunova for £5 million from the sale of the house they owned. The judge also ordered him to pay £35 million of Mr Abramovich’s legal fees. It was recently reported that Berezovsky had begun to sell personal assets, including a yacht and a painting by Andy Warhol, in order to pay his debts.
Boris Abramovich Berezovsky was born to Jewish parents in Moscow in 1946. His father, Abram Markovich, was a construction engineer from Tomsk, and his mother, Anna Aleksandrovna, worked in the Paediatric Institute of the Soviet Academy of Medical Sciences. He finished school in 1962 and enrolled in the Moscow Forestry Institute’s recently opened electronics and digital technology faculty, graduating in 1967. In 1969 he started work as a junior engineer at the Soviet Union’s Moscow-based Hydrometerological Scientific Research Centre before moving to the Academy of Science’s Institute of Management Problems. Until 1989 he worked in Moscow State University as a respected academic, publishing widely.
He started working with AvtoVAZ (the Soviet car production organisation) in 1973, but it was not until the fall of the Soviet Union and its command economy that the job became a means to make a fortune. Like much of Soviet industry, the overstaffed car factory run by AvtoVAZ produced poor-quality goods very inefficiently. Berezovsky suggested setting up a company in Switzerland which would be a joint venture with AvtoVAZ, thus encouraging and enabling foreign investment. It also enabled Berezovsky to reap vast profits for himself. By the mid-1990s, he was one of the more notorious beneficiaries of the fiscal and legal chaos that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. He was said to be the first man in Moscow to own a Mercedes.
Berezovsky developed a broad business profile. From selling and importing cars he moved into banking and media ownership. From 1994 to 1996 he led the council of directors of “ORTV-Russian National TV” and was a shareholder in “Moscow Independent Broadcasting Corporation”.
The privatisation of Soviet industry amounted in effect to the assetstripping of an entire nation. It was a cut-throat business, in which corruption, fraud and violence played significant roles. It brought untold wealth to a fortunate or unscrupulous few, but it was not without its hazards. Berezovsky became a target for assassination. He in turn was to be questioned by law enforcement agencies in connection with at least one murder.
Political patronage was the key to Berezovsky’s success. General Alexander Korzhakov, Boris Yeltsin’s aide and Presidential Security Service head, had supported Berezovsky in the early 1990s, helping him in the acquisition of state-owned assets. Berezovsky had actively wooed the political elite, in 1993 offering to publish Yeltsin’s second book in Finland, at his own expense. Although the book spectacularly failed to sell, Berezovsky had negotiated an extravagant advance, which he invested wisely, and the President remained unaware that the income he received was from the soundly invested advance rather than worldwide book sales. It may not have been the deciding factor in the development of such close relations between Berezovsky and the Yeltsin regime, but it certainly oiled the wheels of friendship. The support of Berezovsky’s media empire proved vital to Yeltsin in the 1996 election.
Berezovsky had access to the highest levels of Russia’s political and security elite, but his influence was not limited to those who held constitutional positions. Yeltsin’s regime became notorious for its nepotism and corruption. Known as The Family, there was a close circle of advisers, friends and relatives, all of whom reaped heavy fiscal reward from the continued activity in office of the ever more weary-looking Yeltsin. Yeltsin’s daughter, Tatyana Dyachenko, was at the heart of it, and exerted real political influence over her father. Berezovsky gave her gifts including cars and jewellery.
By 1996 Berezovskyhad added the oil company SibNeft to his business concerns. The following year Forbes estimated he was worth $3 billion. His wealth went hand in hand with a growing involvement in politics. In 1997 he led a campaign to free Russian TV journalists who had been taken hostage by Chechen fighters. And in May 1997 he helped to organise the signing of the international declaration of peace between the Russian Federation and the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria. In November he was appointed adviser to Valentin Yumashev, head of the Presidential Administration.
He had his enemies, however. In November 1997 the two first Deputy Prime Ministers, Anatoly Chubais and Boris Nemtsov, called for Berezovsky to be removed from his position on the National Security Council. Yeltsin conceded. In May 1998 Berezovsky was sacked from his position as adviser to the head of the Presidential Administration. Later that year, an open letter he had written to the man who was then director of the FSB, Vladimir Putin, was published in the Russian newspaper Kommersant Daily. In it Berezovsky voiced fears of an assassination attempt against him. Five months later the Russian Prosecutor General ordered that he be detained. Charges against him included money-laundering and corruption.
Although it seemed his star was on the wane, he continued to be a significant player. In December 1999 he was elected as a deputy to the State Duma, Russia’s parliament, and he served as an independent non-party affiliated parliamentarian, hoping to exploit the immunity from prosecution it afforded.
A spectacular falling-out with Yeltsin and his associates led to a series of security service raids on Berezovsky’s businesses and accusations of extortion, espionage and fraud. Nonetheless, Berezovsky supported Yeltsin’s nominated heir Vladimir Putin, attempting to regain the political influence he had held. Putin, however, was suspicious of the wealthy businessmen who had bought their places at the centre of the Russian political machine. Realising that the game was up, in late 2000 Berezovsky moved to the UK, just as fraud and corruption charges were being drawn up against him in Moscow.
From his residences in London and Surrey, Berezovsky funded opposition to Putin, and publicised Russian state abuses of power. His allies in London included Ahmad Zakaev, a Chechen warlord wanted in Moscow for links to terrorism, and Alexander Litvinenko, whose death has prompted a cold spell in Russian-British relations.
Berezovsky was one of Putin’s most vocal and consistent critics. This won him admiration among British liberals, and an ever-growing list of enemies in Russia. He taunted Moscow regularly and gave interviews to the British press declaring his readiness to support a violent overthrow of the Russian regime.
It was Berezovsky who first pointed to the London murder of Alexander Litvinenko as being an act prepared in Moscow at the highest levels. Moscow retaliated with accusations voiced by a spy suspect in the Litvinenko case, Andrei Lugovoi, that Berezovsky was running a spy recruitment ring for MI6, and helping to manufacture false claims for political asylum in Britain for wealthy Russians.
He is survived by two children from his relationship with Elena Gorbunova and by two children from his first marriage and two from his second.
Boris Berezovsky, Russian businessman, was born on January 23, 1946. He was found dead on March 23, 2013, aged 67
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The night before Boris Bereszovsky was found dead, he was sitting in a Park Lane hotel dressed all in black and struggling to control a shaking hand.
He was “very depressed and very lost” as he drank tea with honey in the Four Seasons with a Russian journalist. Friends of Ilya Zhegulyov, a correspondent who had known Mr Berezovsky for years, said that the exiled oligarch, 67, looked like a mourner. He put his right hand on the table or against his body but could not stop the shaking. Less than 24 hours later, Mr Berezovsky was found slumped dead on the floor in a bathroom at his mansion in Ascot, Berkshire. He had been living alone for several months.
His bodyguard broke down the door at about 3pm on Saturday, concerned that he had not seen Mr Bereszovsky since his return from London.
Police said they were trying to “gain a better understanding” of the businessman’s state of mind in his final days and indicated that they thought he had killed himself. Detective Chief Inspector Kevin Brown of Thames Valley Police said: “We do not have evidence to suggest third party involvement.”
However, given the dead man’s association with the murdered ex-KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko and the history of attempts on his life in Moscow and London, police are continuing to investigate. MI5 and Scotland Yard’s anti-terror unit have been kept informed and it is understood that samples from Mr Berezovsky’s body will be sent to the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston for analysis.
Scientists there discovered that Mr Litvinenko had been poisoned in 2006 with radioactive polonium 210.
Mr Berezovsky’s friend said he had been depressed after losing a court battle with Roman Abramovich, the Chelsea FC owner, in October. His assets had been frozen after he and Helena Gorbunova separated in December.
“I don’t think there was any reason for the Russians to kill Boris - he was destroyed six months ago by the British courts,” said Alex Goldfarb, a longtime friend. “That was a huge victory for \ Putin. Boris was effectively taken out of the picture. He had started smoking again, he was drinking, he had stopped enjoying life. He was under tremendous stress.” Lord Bell, Mr Berezovsky’s PR spokesman, said: “I saw him last two weeks ago and he was very depressed, very low.”
Mr Berezovsky’s finances were in a parlous state and he was living behind high fences and barbed-wire in Titness Park House, a chateau-style residence overlooking Windsor Great Park.
An ambulance was called to the property by the guard at 3.23pm and Mr Berezovsky was pronounced dead at the scene. Specialist officers were called in after a paramedic’s personal radiation monitor device went off. The area was given the all-clear yesterday morning and South Central Ambulance Service said that normal environmental factors might have triggered the alert.
A post-mortem examination is likely to begin today. Amid reports that a scarf was found next to Mr Beresovsky’s body, Nikolai Glushkov, another friend, told the Guardian: “Boris was strangled. Either he did it himself or with the help of someone. I don’t believe it was suicide. This was not just a normal death.”
Mr Berezovsky had six children, the youngest of whom is 15, and grandchildren. The family has asked police to withhold some details about the death until younger relatives have been spoken to.
Mr Brown said: “We are at the early stages of the investigation and we are retaining an open mind as we progress. We are focused on conducting a thorough investigation as we would with any unexplained death.”
Neighbours in Ascot say they rarely saw Mr Berezovsky, or any of the other wealthy Russians now living in the area. One man said he was once approached by bodyguards when trimming his hedge. “They won’t tell us the names of the Russians. They’re hardly ever here. One of them only travels in by helicopter. They’re all paranoid.”
In his final political conversation before his death, Mr Berezovsky had spoken about his deep desire to return to Russia and how he had lost faith in the opposition to President Putin. He is said to have expressed the feeling that he had underestimated the Russian leader by thinking that he could overthrow him. He felt that President Putin was too powerful to be defeated.
Mr Berezovsky also spoke of having had “many disappointments” in his life in London and of feeling that there was “no point” to his life. A friend of Mr Zhegulyov said that Mr Berezovsky had told the Forbes Magazine journalist: “I don’t want to be involved in politics. I don’t know what to do. I’m 67 years old. And I don’t know what I should do.”
The dead man’s associates in London cast doubt, however, on claims from the Kremlin that he was negotiating with officials to return home. President Putin’s spokesman said the Kremlin would not be opposed to considering a request for Mr Berezovsky’s funeral to take place in Moscow.