Putin’s People. Catherine Belton

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СКАЧАТЬ seen in a meeting with his lawyers, at which they’d warned him he’d need £10 million to secure bail on an imminent Russian extradition request – cash to which Pugachev didn’t have access. A few weeks later he surfaced in France, where he’d gained citizenship in 2009, and where French law protected its citizens from extradition to Russia. He’d fled to the relative safety of his villa high in the hills above the bay of Nice, a fortress surrounded by an impenetrable high iron fence, a team of bodyguards and a battery of security cameras at every turn.

      The ease with which the Kremlin had been able to pursue its case against him in London seemed to Pugachev, as the Russians would say, like the first lastochka – the first swallow of spring. It was the arrival of Moscow rules in London, where the Kremlin could twist and distort the legal process to suit its agenda, where the larger issue of its expropriation of Pugachev’s multi-billion-dollar business empire could be artfully buried in the minutiae of rules related to the freezing order and whether Pugachev had correctly followed them. Pugachev was no angel, of course. It was not at all clear what had happened to the $700 million he’d been accused of siphoning from Mezhprombank. But a series of asset disclosures, unquestioned by the UK High Court, had revealed that $250 million of that money had been returned to the bank, while the trail of the remainder had been lost in companies liquidated by a former Pugachev ally who was now working closely with the Kremlin. Later, Swiss prosecutors, asked by Russia to block Pugachev’s Swiss bank accounts, said they’d found no evidence that any crime was committed when the $700 million was transferred from Pugachev’s company accounts in Mezhprombank to the Swiss bank account at the height of the 2008 crisis.[11]

      But even though the Kremlin lawyers had not opened a fraud case against him in the UK, even though there appeared to be no trail of stolen funds, the legal pursuit of Pugachev was relentless. Lawyers working for the Russian State Deposit Agency insisted they had him ‘bang to rights’ over Mezhprombank’s bankruptcy. ‘If you get cash from a regulator, you should take it to help the bank survive, not fund a payment to yourself,’ one person close to the legal team said.[12] Despite the Kremlin having expropriated his business empire, and his having begun to fear for his life, Pugachev was found in contempt of court for fleeing the UK, and sentenced in absentia to two years in jail. During the contempt hearings he was frequently branded a liar. He’d flouted the rules of the freezing order. He’d not only fled the country, but transferred funds from the sale of two cars to France. One of the judges presiding over the case, Justice Vivienne Rose, found she could not ‘safely rely on any evidence he gave’. A New Zealand trust he’d set up to hold tens of millions of dollars in properties, including his Chelsea home, was later found to be a sham.

      For all his flaws, Pugachev insisted he had been caught in a Russian state vendetta pursued through the UK courts. The Kremlin seemed intent on quashing any notion that he’d ever been well-connected in the Kremlin, or that he could have any knowledge that could be damaging to it. It had been able to suppress any political connotation to the case by leveraging the diminishing knowledge of Russia in the UK intelligence services, which had been distracted by monitoring the Islamic terrorist threat, and Pugachev’s own low profile. Before things had got tough in London, Pugachev had never given an interview in his life. Few knew who he was. Most people believed it was the recently deceased oligarch Boris Berezovsky who had helped bring Putin to power. Lawyers at Hogan Lovells had been told that Pugachev was a nobody, and the case against him had nothing to do with politics. ‘I’ve not seen any evidence of what he was doing in the Kremlin,’ said one person close to the legal team. ‘We have to be extremely careful. Pugachev seems to say whatever he wants. The people I have spoken to just say he was a blatant crook.’[13]

      But in fact Pugachev had worked at the heart of the Kremlin, and had been privy to some of its deepest secrets, including how it was exactly that Putin came to power. This seemed to be one of the main reasons the Kremlin was so intent on pursuing him, and making sure he was tied up in legal knots. Even before the Kremlin took over his business empire, he’d been seeking to leave Russia, to escape the endless intrigue of business there. Already, he’d been sidelined by Putin’s KGB allies from St Petersburg, and he’d begun seeking French citizenship in 2007. For those on the inside, Pugachev was being punished precisely for seeking to exit the tight-knit system that ruled Russia, the mafia clan which no one was ever meant to leave. ‘Pugachev was like a kidney. He was essential for the functioning of the system. But he lost his mind and thought he could leave and work on his own business. Of course the order was given to destroy him,’ said a senior Russian banker involved in financial operations for the Kremlin.[14]

      In the rush of his flight from the UK to France, Pugachev left behind a number of telltale signs. Detectives working for the Kremlin’s lawyers had swooped in to raid his Knightsbridge office on a court order issued in the days after his disappearance. Among the reams of documents, there were a number of disc drives. On one of the disc drives were recordings: the Russian security services had been secretly taping every meeting he held in his downtown Moscow office since the end of the nineties.

      One of the recordings vividly documents Pugachev’s candid and rueful feelings about Putin and his own role in bringing him to power. The tape records Pugachev sitting in his office with Valentin Yumashev, former president Boris Yeltsin’s son-in-law and chief of staff, discussing over dinner and fine wine the tense state of affairs as Moscow hurtled through yet another political crisis. It was November 2007, and just a few months remained before Putin would come to the end of his second consecutive term as president, at which point Russia’s constitution dictated that he must step down. But although Putin had made vague statements about becoming prime minister after standing down as president, there was not yet even a whisper of his real intentions. In the warren-like corridors of the Kremlin, the former KGB and security men who had risen to power with Putin had been jostling for position, bickering and backstabbing in hopes that they, or their candidate, would be selected as his successor.

      Pugachev and Yumashev quietly clinked glasses as they discussed the standoff. The uncertainty over the succession was bringing back strong memories of 1999, when they’d assisted Putin’s rise. It seemed to them an age ago. By now they had been eclipsed by Putin’s KGB allies from St Petersburg. By now they were almost relics from a totally different era. The system of power had changed irrevocably, and they were still struggling to understand what they’d done.

      ‘You remember how it was when he came into power?’ says Pugachev on the tape. ‘He would say, “I am the manager. I have been hired.”’ In those days, Putin had appeared reluctant to take the leading role, and seemed malleable and compliant to those who’d helped bring him to power. ‘Between us, at the beginning I think he had the idea to become rich, to live a happy life, to decide his own personal issues,’ Pugachev goes on. ‘And in principle, he decided these issues very quickly … But as the four years of his first term passed he understood things had happened that would never allow him to step down.’

      Putin’s first term had been drenched in blood and controversy. It led to a sweeping transformation of the way the country was run. He faced a series of deadly terrorist attacks, including the siege of the Dubrovka theatre in Moscow by Chechen terrorists in October 2002. The hostage-taking ended with more than a hundred dead when the Russian security services botched the storming of the theatre and gassed the very theatregoers they’d been trying to free.

      Putin’s battles with rebels from the restive northern Caucasus republic of Chechnya had caused thousands of deaths, including the 294 who died in a string of apartment bombings. Many in Moscow whispered Putin’s security services were behind these bloody attacks, not least because the end result was a security clampdown that strengthened his power.

      The freewheeling oligarchs of the 1990s were soon brought to heel. It had taken just one big case against the country’s richest man for Putin and his men to rein in the market freedoms of the Yeltsin era, and to launch a takeover by the state.

      ‘He would have gone gladly after four years, I think,’ Pugachev continues. ‘But then all these controversies happened. With СКАЧАТЬ