Londongrad: From Russia with Cash; The Inside Story of the Oligarchs. Mark Hollingsworth

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СКАЧАТЬ and a Christian mother. In his early years the family lived in cramped communal housing, though circumstances later improved when his father was promoted.

      Khodorkovsky’s nursery school was next door to the factory where his father worked and he remembers climbing the fence with his friends to steal pieces of metal. It was Misha’s dream from an early age to become a director of a factory and the other children at his nursery school accordingly nicknamed him ‘Director’. Khodorkovsky left school in 1981 and read chemistry at the Mendeleev Institute of Chemical Technology in Moscow, specializing in the study of rocket fuel. He supported his studies by working as a carpenter in a housing cooperative and it was at university that he met his first wife Elena, a fellow student.

      Their first son, Pavlik, was born in 1985 and the young scientist grimly recalls going out at six o’clock every morning with ration coupons to buy baby food. Khodorkovsky graduated from the Mendeleev Institute at the top of his year in 1996. Although his earliest ambitions to work in defence were thwarted by the fact that he was a Jew, he became the Deputy Secretary of Moscow’s Frunze district Komsomol - the Young Communist League. Like many Komsomol leaders, he used the organization’s real-estate holdings and political connections to profit from perestroika.

      In 1986 Khodorkovsky met his second wife Inna and set up the Centre for Scientific and Technical Youth. Purportedly a youth group, the Centre was merely a front for their commercial activities. ‘He dealt in everything: blue jeans, brandy, and computers - whatever could make money,’ recalled a former senior Yukos executive.¹¹ Khodorkovsky and his colleagues peddled new technologies to Soviet factories, imported personal computers, and sold French brandy. Leonid Nevzlin, who became his closest business associate, recalls that all this was done with the backing of the Communist Party: ‘To a certain extent, Khodorkovsky was sent by the Komsomol and the party [into the private sector].’¹²

      By 1987 Khodorkovsky’s enterprises boasted many Soviet ministries as clients, employed 5,000 people, and enjoyed annual revenue of eighty million roubles. Later that year the Komsomol’s central committee gave its organizations the authority to set up bank accounts and raise and spend their own money. Pouncing on this opportunity, the perspicacious Khodorkovsky set up Bank Menatep. The bank soon expanded and by 1990, a year before the fall of communism, it was even setting up offshore accounts, seven years before he hired the lawyer Stephen Curtis.

      After Yeltsin came to power, Khodorkovsky soon came to appreciate the value of connections. He started courting senior bureaucrats and politicians, holding lavish receptions for high-level guests at top clubs in Moscow as well as at smart dachas owned by Menatep on the Rublevskoye Highway, the exclusive residential area to the west of the capital. By 1991, he was an adviser to the Russian Prime Minister Ivan Silaev. For a brief spell, he was a deputy fuel and energy minister.

      One of Yeltsin’s early market reforms was to end the Central Bank’s monopoly of banking for government institutions. Those entrepreneurs who had already set up banks were well placed to take advantage of this relaxation of the rules. Russia then, as now, was a country where little happened unless a bribe was paid - vzyat or kapusta as it is called in Russian. In the case of the transfer of deposits, it was widely alleged that the banks that paid the biggest bribes to high-level politicians and state officials would receive the wealthiest new clients. And the payments were often deposited offshore. According to Bill Browder, an American banker who set up Hermitage Capital Management, one of the largest funds investing in Russia, ‘These entrepreneurs would set up banks and in many cases would go to government ministers and say, you put the ministries on deposit in my bank and I’ll put five or ten million bucks in a Swiss bank account with your name on it.’¹³

      The paybacks offered entry into the highly lucrative business of handling state money. By 1994, Menatep was responsible for funds collected for the victims of the Chernobyl disaster of 1986 as well as the finances of Moscow’s city government and the Ministry of Finance itself. At thirty-one and by now a multi-national tycoon, Khodorkovsky hired the accountancy firm Arthur Andersen to audit his books and spent $1 million on advertisements in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. His office was an imposing Victorianstyle castle in central Moscow with huge bronze letters announcing its presence and surrounded by a tall wrought-iron fence with sharp spikes. The grounds swarmed with armed security guards, some in well-tailored suits, others in black uniforms and boots.

      Flush with cash, Khodorkovsky was now able to target the industrial enterprises next in line to be sold off. It was the sale of the vast Siberian oil company Yukos, in what was a remarkably profitable deal that was to turn Khodorkovsky into a super-rich international tycoon. The process of transfer of vast state industries via the ‘loans for shares’ scheme was supposed to be handled by open auctions. In reality they were nothing of the sort. Only select bidders were invited to tender, and in many cases the auctions were actually controlled by the very people making the bids - sometimes using companies to disguise their identity.

      In the case of Yukos, it was Khodorkovsky’s Menatep that was in charge of processing the bids in the auction. In a hotly contested auction, higher bids were disqualified on ‘technical grounds’ and Khodorkovsky won the auction. In this way he and his partners acquired a 78 per cent stake in Yukos and 2 per cent of the world’s oil reserves for a mere $309 million. When the shares began trading two years later in 1997, Yukos’s market capitalization was worth thirty times that figure. One by one, the state’s industrial conglomerates were being sold off at ‘liquidation-sale prices’ according to Strobe Talbott, former US Assistant Secretary of State.¹⁴

      It was a pattern repeated in the other auctions. The Sibneft auction for example, was managed by NFK. In most cases there was ultimately only one bidder. In some instances the auction was not even won by the highest bidder.

      The ‘loans for shares’ scheme turned many of the buyers from rouble multi-millionaires into dollar billionaires almost overnight. Initially, the lenders acquired only a proportion of the assets, but over the next couple of years the government also sold off the remaining tranches of shares in a series of lots, again without the competitive bids and auctions promised, and with the original lenders securing the remaining shares for themselves.

      By now ordinary Russians had lost patience with the process of privatization. The economy was in tatters, few had benefited from the voucher fiasco, while many had ploughed their savings into schemes that had simply swallowed up their money. There was widespread disbelief that a few dozen political and business insiders were walking off with Russia’s industrial and mineral wealth at cut prices. Disillusioned with the President and his policies, ordinary Russians began to exhibit a yearning for what they saw as the security and stability of communism. There was suddenly a real prospect that the shambolic, drunken Yeltsin would lose the forthcoming election in 1996 to the revitalized Communist Party candidate Gennady Zyuganov.

      Opinion polls recorded Yeltsin’s popularity at a derisory 6 per cent. ‘It’s all over,’ said one American diplomat in Moscow. ‘I’m getting ready for Yeltsin to go.’¹⁵ Promising to stop the auctions for the remaining shares, Zyuganov fully intended to pursue the oligarchs. At the time the international investor and philanthropist George Soros, now one of the oligarchs’ greatest critics, warned Berezovsky somewhat acidly that if the communists were to win, ‘you are going to hang from a lamppost’.¹⁶

      Berezovsky was only too aware that he had enemies among the communists. At a secret meeting in Davos in the Swiss Alps during the World Economic Forum in February 1996, he galvanized the wealthiest businessmen known in Russia as ‘the Group of Seven’. They agreed to bankroll Yeltsin’s election campaign СКАЧАТЬ