by Luke Harding
As Abramovich told it, Berezovsky was someone who came to believe he was invincible – intellectually brilliant, but inconsistent, easily distracted, and obsessed with grandiose and ultimately pointless schemes. He was uninterested, Abramovich said, in the quotidian detail of running a company. Moreover, Berezovsky behaved like a child. Often he said the first thing that came into his head, Abramovich claimed in his statement, adding: ‘He would quite often convince himself that something was true, only later to convince himself of the opposite.’
The Chelsea FC owner was certainly right about one thing – that this was, as he put it, ‘a uniquely Russian story’. It hinged on what kind of agreement had been struck between the two participants many years previously. Berezovsky said the Sibneft deal had been made orally – a typical arrangement in Russia at the time, he argued, where business was done on the basis of personal trust and a handshake. Abramovich maintained that Berezovsky was never his partner.
This, then, was the story of two oligarchs – one loyal to the Putin regime, another actively plotting its overthrow.
The case began on a blue-skied October day. It was an alluring spectacle. Here were two figures who had played a key role in shaping the history of modern Russia – robber barons or respectable entrepreneurs, depending on your point of view – facing off against each other in the rule-bound setting of an English courtroom.
The question was: which of them would Mrs Justice Gloster believe?
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Over the years, the Kremlin had tried various strategies to destroy Berezovsky. It had sought unsuccessfully to extradite him from Britain. There had been criminal prosecutions in Russia, trials in absentia, guilty verdicts. And of course the exemplary murder of Litvinenko, Berezovsky’s friend and lieutenant.
At some stage, his enemies noticed that he had a fondness for going to law. Berezovsky had served his writ against Abramovich after spotting him out shopping in the London branch of Hermès. Berezovsky was confident that Abramovich would settle, never believing he would turn up in a British court.
Now the case was about to start. According to Berezovsky’s friend Yuli Dubov – they had known each other since 1972 – the oligarch hadn’t actually read his own witness statement. Nor had he bothered to wade through 1,500 pages of court documents. What was going on?
‘He was a genius gambler,’ Dubov told me later. ‘It wasn’t fascinating for him to win. He had to win against the odds. If there is something that has to be done by midnight he would start doing it at 11.55 p.m.’ Berezovsky had always done impossible things – getting a PhD in the 1970s Soviet Union at a time of prejudice against Jews, winning elections for Yeltsin, bringing Putin into the Kremlin. Why should this time be different?
Berezovsky’s preparations, then, had been woefully inadequate. ‘He thought that he could go into court and after five minutes everybody would be charmed by his personality,’ Dubov said. Further, he had misjudged Abramovich in the same way he misread Putin. Berezovsky had known Abramovich as a callow young man. In the intervening years Abramovich had grown up, got serious.
‘Boris had a very high estimate of himself and a low estimate of his opponents,’ Dubov said. He added: ‘It’s the surest way of losing when you go into a fight.’
Abramovich had spent months preparing for the case. He hired a top legal team. Representing him was Jonathan Sumption, a stellar QC and now a UK Supreme Court justice. Often described as one of the cleverest men in Britain, Sumption is a scholar of medieval history. He is also the owner of a handsome French chateau, complete with dreamy towers, turrets and ramparts, in the Dordogne.
Sumption’s fee was rumoured to be more than £5 million. Berezovsky’s lead barrister was the South African-born Laurence Rabinowitz QC. Both took up positions in front of their respective clients. The judge, Mrs Justice Gloster, came in. She sat beneath the royal coat of arms: a lion and unicorn, a heraldic shield, and the motto in old French: ‘Evil be to him that evil thinks’.
Rabinowitz told the judge that the two Russians had worked together to acquire a shared asset, Sibneft, which made both of them wildly rich. After Berezovsky fled to London, Abramovich could remain loyal to his old friend or ‘profit from his difficulties’. He took the second option, the QC said. He conceded that the case was ‘incredibly complex’.
It wasn’t helped by the fact that several of its participants were dead. Berezovsky’s Georgian business partner Patarkatsishvili died of a heart attack in 2008; the British lawyer Stephen Curtis, who took notes at a crucial business meeting, perished in a helicopter crash in 2004 in Dorset. Rabinowitz added: ‘The case is rather lacking in contemporaneous documents. But some shine out like a beacon.’
At the end of day one, Berezovsky was in good cheer. The case seemed to be going his way. Marina Litvinenko had turned up to support him. We had met over lunch that summer, introduced by a former lecturer in Russian, Martin Dewhirst. I liked her immediately.
The next day, Berezovsky took to the witness box. He looked relaxed, in charcoal jacket and open shirt, and declared himself ready to answer everything and anything. Berezovsky opted to speak in English. After over a decade in the UK, Berezovsky’s English was fluent. It didn’t always make sense, though: his sentences were often ungrammatical, with muddled tenses, articles that tended to go awol, and errant prepositions. He had a strong Russian accent.
He began by sketching his relations with Yeltsin – good, he said, after he got friendly with the president’s daughter Tatiana.
Sumption, Abramovich’s star lawyer, got to his feet. The barrister pointed out that in 2001 Berezovsky had sued Forbes magazine after it said that he had influenced Yeltsin through his daughter. Now Berezovsky had just admitted this was true. Sumption read from Berezovsky’s earlier witness statement. ‘Why did you deny it and then sign a statement of truth in support of your denial?’ he asked. Visibly flustered, Berezovsky gave a smile. He replied: ‘It’s a good question.’
The court laughed. Mrs Justice Gloster was unimpressed. She chipped in: ‘Well, could you answer it, please?’ Berezovsky said his lawyers had prepared the document, and he hadn’t paid too much attention to it.
The rest of the day was less painful. Berezovsky agreed with Sumption’s description of 1990s Russia as the ‘wild east’. (The barrister further likened the lawless post-communist era to ‘fourteenth-century England’, his expert period.) The oligarch admitted that corruption was widespread, but said that he personally ‘wasn’t corrupt’. He said that, under Yeltsin, Russia was significantly less corrupt than today under Putin’s authoritarian leadership, which scored ten out of ten for corruption compared with Yeltsin’s ‘three or four’ out of ten.
The hearings settled into a routine. Berezovsky attended every day. Outside the courtroom he chatted to journalists, many of them Russian; he shook hands, greeted well-wishers. I introduced myself. Berezovsky muttered something; a bodyguard gave me his business card; the great man moved on. At lunch he ate sushi with his legal team in a third-floor consultation room.
Abramovich, by contrast, didn’t mingle. It was as if an invisible bubble protected him. The two men politely ignored each other. In the corridors and the lift they kept apart, their teams occupying different parts of the wavy glass court complex.
For onlookers, the case was the best free show in town, not least because it offered a glimpse into the weird world of the super-rich. Forbes estimated Abramovich’s then fortune at $13.4 billion. Giving evidence, he admitted to owning a string of properties. They included a multimillion-pound chateau in France, once belonging to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor; a 420-acre estate in West Sussex, Fyning Hill; and a ‘large and expensive central London’ home in Lowndes Square, Knightsbridge.
Asked if he had an extravagant lifestyle, Abramovich said: ‘Well, yes, possibly. I agree, yes, one could put it that way.’
According to Abramovich, he and Berezovsky had been friends, but not close friends. Instead their relationship was one of ‘protectee’ and ‘protector’. On
ce Berezovsky fell out with Putin, Abramovich considered their krysha arrangement defunct. He said he continued to hand over large sums to a greedy Berezovsky because he felt some loyalty to him.
The reality, though, was Berezovsky’s epoch was over. ‘Russia had moved on. I had moved on,’ he said. Meanwhile, Abramovich said he’d never aspired to be a public person. He said he was taken aback that buying Chelsea FC in 2003 had made him a figure of global interest. In 2005, Abramovich said he sold his share in Sibneft to Gazprom, an arm of the Russian government. He got $13 billion for it.
Rabinowitz did his best to pull Abramovich’s story apart. But the oligarch was well prepared. He gave his evidence in Russian. Mostly, Abramovich replied to the QC’s questions with a single word: ‘Da’. His style was minimalist. (At one point, having failed to receive an answer, Rabinowitz prodded him with the words: ‘Could you say “Da”, please.’) The court adjourned in January 2012 while Mrs Justice Gloster went away to write her judgment.
Eight months later, on the last day of August, the judge came back. Berezovsky strolled into the Rolls building, as ebullient and upbeat as ever. I asked him if he was about to win his battle against his ex-friend? He told me: ‘I’m confident. I believe in the system,’ then we went through the metal detector together to the lift. We travelled up to the fourth floor.
At 10.30 a.m., Gloster walked into court. Everyone rose. There was a hush. The first three rows were packed with lawyers – the true winners in this multi-billion-pound struggle. Berezovsky sat in his old spot on the left near the door, two bodyguards behind him. Abramovich wasn’t there. ‘He’s probably on his yacht in Corfu or Marbella,’ someone whispered.
Berezovsky had always believed in British justice – which, after all, had granted his 2003 application for political asylum. It had handed him handsome libel victories, too. But on this occasion, the same system delivered him an almighty and humiliating kick. First, the judge dismissed his case and his claim that he was ever a partner with Abramovich in Sibneft. Then she gave her reasons.
They were withering, in the kind of remorseless language rarely heard in the High Court. Berezovsky, we learned, had destroyed himself early on in the witness box. ‘On my analysis of the entirety of the evidence, I found Mr Berezovsky an unimpressive and inherently unreliable witness, who regarded truth as a transitory, flexible concept, which could be moulded to suit his current purposes,’ the judge said.
Berezovsky clutched his face. She continued: ‘At times the evidence which he gave was deliberately dishonest; sometimes he was clearly making his evidence up as he went along in response to the perceived difficulty in answering the questions in a manner consistent with his case.
‘At other times, I gained the impression that he was not necessarily being deliberately dishonest, but had deluded himself into believing his own version of events. On occasions he tried to avoid answering questions by making long and irrelevant speeches, or by professing to have forgotten facts which he had been happy to record in his pleadings or witness statements.’
Berezovsky had been right about one thing. Abramovich had charmed the judge. She concluded that Abramovich was a ‘truthful and on the whole reliable witness’ – one who gave ‘careful and thoughtful answers, which were focused on the specific issues about which he was questioned’.
The judge even absolved Putin of wrongdoing. She said that there was no evidence that Putin had bullied Berezovsky into selling his TV station, a remark that prompted laughter and incredulity from Russians sitting in the back row. Putin had held a grudge against the British judicial system ever since it granted Berezovsky asylum. Now it had delivered Putin a glorious victory.
A stunned Berezovsky appeared on the pavement in front of the cameras. The judge had tried to rewrite Russian history, he said, adding that his faith in the system had been badly shaken. Had he expected to win? ‘Absolutely.’ Berezovsky said he hadn’t yet decided whether to appeal – a tricky step, given the judge’s devastating comments. ‘I’m absolutely amazed what happened today. I’m surprised completely,’ he said.
He quoted Winston Churchill, who said that democracy was bad but that nobody had devised a better alternative. He said: ‘English court is bad but there is nothing better.’ The oligarch said he didn’t regret bringing the case. He even attempted a note of stoicism, observing: ‘Life is life.’ He left in a black Mercedes.
Berezovsky had suffered a grievous blow. But friends pointed to his enormous appetite for life, politics and intrigue. They mentioned his love of women, and his wealth. His fortune was now much diminished. But he was still rich. They thought he would recover.
*
Gloster’s verdict was peculiar. Juridically it was perhaps unanswerable. Berezovsky had contradicted himself in the witness box; any court would take a dim view of lying. For those who knew Russia in the 1990s, though, it seemed strange. There were no bad guys and good guys at that time; the privatisations that benefited a small group of oligarchs were surely all dubious and done at the expense of ordinary Russians; the absence of documentation from this period was unsurprising.
Berezovsky’s friends felt an injustice had taken place. They considered appealing. Nikolai Glushkov, who gave evidence for Berezovsky, thought the judgment was deeply one-sided. He complained to the court authorities, without success. Frustrated, he showed me the letter he’d got by way of brush-off. Dubov took a slightly different view. He felt Berezovky had told the truth, broadly, but that much of the detail was wrong or invented retrospectively.
It was ironic. An English court had achieved something the Kremlin had been trying to do for a decade – shut down Berezovsky’s anti-Putin London operation. As a result of his diminished wealth, Goldfarb closed down the International Foundation for Civil Liberties. Over twelve years it had disbursed $75 million on various causes – grants to the Sakharov museum in Moscow; full-page newspaper adverts depicting Putin as Groucho Marx during the 2006 G8 summit; Litvinenko’s London rent.
The immediate casualty was Marina Litvinenko, whose legal costs Berezovsky had underwritten. She was faced with a problem. Where to find £300,000 so she could be represented at a forthcoming inquest into her husband’s death? I agreed to help; we shot a video at the Guardian’s office. Marina told me she wanted to hang on to her legal counsel so she might uncover the truth behind the murder. ‘I’m very grateful for all these things Berezovsky did for us. For six years he supported us,’ she said.
By end of the year there was no word from Berezovsky himself as to whether he would appeal. In the past, Berezovsky had been happy to give interviews. As a result of his loss to Abramovich he’d ceased to be a public and political figure. He was uncharacteristically dormant. Sometimes he answered his mobile; more often he didn’t. (I reached him once and he agreed to meet, but we never fixed a date.) He sold his home in Wentworth, Surrey – he faced £100 million in legal bills – and moved into his ex-wife Galina Besharova’s place near Ascot in Berkshire.
Previously, Berezovsky had slept just four hours a night. He had thrown himself into multiple projects, exhausting all those around him. He travelled regularly to Israel and South Africa. In the wake of defeat, his world shrank. He would come down from his bedroom for breakfast, return to his room, and not emerge again until mid-afternoon. Friends suspected the verdict had sent him into a psychological decline; his normal energy and joie de vivre gone.
By early 2013, Berezovsky’s family – two ex-wives, one ex-partner and six children – felt he was in better shape. He had, they thought, thrown off his depression. In February, Glushkov emailed me to say that he had quarrelled with Boris, but added that he was ‘most positive’ his friend would be ‘back in public life’ later that year.
In late March, his bodyguard, Avi Navama, went off to do some shopping, leaving Berezovsky alone in the Surrey house. It was a Saturday afternoon. Navama is an Israeli former special forces soldier. He’d spent six years living with Berezovsky and was at his side during the High Court hearing
s. Navama returned at 3 p.m. There was no sign of his boss. He saw Berezovsky’s mobile phone lying on the table. There were missed calls. This was unusual. He went upstairs to the bathroom. No sound. The door was locked from the inside.
Navama kicked open the door. Inside, he found Berezovsky lying on the floor, his favourite black scarf twisted around his neck. The neck showed bruising. Next to Berezovsky was a broken shower rail. Navama touched Berezovsky’s hand. It was cold. He retreated from the bathroom, shut the door behind him and rang the police.
By the time Berezovsky’s ex-wife Galina arrived at the house, officers from Thames Valley Police were already there; they kept her, her two children and Navama downstairs in the kitchen. Berezovsky’s friend Dubov arrived at 5 p.m. The police wouldn’t allow him inside, so he sat on the road in a police car for the next twelve hours, awaiting news.
Berezovsky’s death, in a secluded estate in south-east England, prompted a full-scale investigation. After Litvinenko’s murder, the police were taking no chances. A paramedic, John Pocock, examined Berezovsky’s body on the bathroom floor. Pocock was carrying a radiation detection device. It gave off a ‘warning tone’. Detectives later said the device had a battery fault.
Government atomic energy scientists tested samples taken from Berezovsky for radioactivity. They were sent to the Atomic Weapons Establishment in Aldermaston. They found no traces.
Nor were there any signs of a break-in.
Instead, the police moved quickly to the theory that Berezovsky had killed himself. Chief Inspector Kevin Brown, the detective in charge, released a statement saying he was ruling out ‘third party involvement at this stage’. His conclusions were apparently drawn from the medical evidence – there was no obvious sign of foul play – and from interviews with Berezovsky’s associates.
The picture was of a depressed and broken man who in his final months had talked frequently of taking his own life. Navama told police that on one occasion Berezovsky had picked up a steak knife, and demanded: ‘Where should I cut?’ On another he asked his bodyguard: ‘What is the best way to die?’ Berezovsky had also inquired how he might choke himself.
