Abramovich v Berezovsky: When oligarchs attack
In a small courtroom in the City of London, two of the world’s richest men are spending a fortune to settle a £3.5 billion point of principle. For once, the Russian tycoons Roman Abramovich and Boris Berezovsky are having to play by someone else’s rules.
A Russian oligarch who says he was ''betrayed'' by Chelsea Football Club owner Roman Abramovich and wants billions of pounds in compensation today told a High Court judge: ''I am not corrupt.''

Roman Abramovich arrives in a silver Mercedes with blacked-out windows. He steps out of the car and is immediately flanked by massive men who make sure nobody gets in his way. But when the oligarch walks through the revolving doors of the Commercial Court in the City of London, even he has to play by somebody else’s rules.

“Court will rise,” says the clerk, and one of the world’s richest men stands, with his bodyguards, lawyers, translators, advisers and hangers-on, in deference to Dame Elizabeth Gloster, the 62-year-old judge who is the law in this room.

She will be in charge for the next three months, or as long as it takes to settle a dispute worth £3.5 billion. Abramovich, owner of Chelsea Football Club, is being sued for breach of trust and breach of contract by his former friend Boris Berezovsky, after allegedly breaking an agreement they made in the 1990s. “I trusted him. I believed he was like my son,” says the small but pugnacious claimant. “He betrayed me.”

Dressed in a dark blue suit and open-necked white shirt, the 63-year-old Berezovsky looks like a well-groomed Danny DeVito. Just before the session opens, he reaches up to put an arm around the neck of his much taller and younger girlfriend, Yelena Gorbunova, and plants a kiss somewhere below her ear.

Earlier this year, Berezovsky, who has been with Ms Gorbunova for 15 years, agreed to the most expensive divorce settlement in British history, paying at least £100 million to his second wife. Ms Gorbunova resembles the first lady of France, Carla Bruni, as she sits in a black suit among the lawyers.
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On the other side of this low room, hidden among his team, sits Roman Arkadievich Abramovich. If his opponent can be loud, then Abbram-oh-vitch – as his lawyers pronounce it – is quiet to the point of silence. In a dark suit and light-blue tie, with a silver beard, he looks no more prosperous than a good accountant – but is actually worth an estimated £10 billion, compared with his opponent’s half a billion.

Close up, you see the bags under his eyes, and the strange expression he wears most of the time: a bashful sadness. His lawyers say he is “domiciled in Russia” even though he has a home in Chelsea, a mansion in Kensington, and is knocking through townhouses in Knightsbridge to make the most expensive property in the country. His ex-wife, Irina, kept the estate in Sussex.

Abramovich lives in a parallel reality – Roman Britain – where hospitals aren’t closing and belts aren’t being tightened, but lawyers are paid fortunes to settle a point of principle. And one of the most prominent figures in British society listens to the whole thing with headphones on, for a Russian translation.

“This is a wholly Russian dispute,” say his lawyers. “Their quarrel has no relevant connection with England.” So why is it being heard here? The obvious answer is that Berezovsky can’t go back to Russia, where he faces fraud and corruption charges and would fear for his life. There have reportedly been at least two assassination attempts since Berezovsky fled Russia in 2000, before claiming political asylum in this country. He has made himself comfortable, with a home at Wentworth Park in Surrey and a taste for Mayfair restaurants.

There is also the Hermès moment, one of the many ways in which this story resembles an episode of Spooks. Berezovsky was out shopping in Sloane Street four years ago when he happened to see his rival in the luxury goods store. Seizing the moment, he apparently served a writ on Abramovich with the words, “I have a present for you.” Abramovich agreed to fight the case here because of that encounter and “in the absence of any practicable alternative forum”.

This is exactly the kind of lucrative international dispute the Government hoped to attract when it built the £300 million Rolls Building, off Fetter Lane. The legal fees on the first day alone were said to be worth £1million, which can’t be bad for the economy.

It’s just a shame that Court 26 is so cramped it would embarrass a local magistrate. Reporters who have to stand for hours cast jealous looks at mysterious Russians in jeans and leather jackets, who have nabbed the press seats but spend all day playing games on their phones. Both camps copy their boss – Berezovsky arrived in an armoured black Maybach limo and his followers are a bit flash, while the opposition supporters are indistinguishable from their lawyers.

Even when he’s being attacked, Abramovich sits there impassive. He is happy to leave the attack to Jonathan Sumption QC, an elegant but incisive former Oxford don, who paces back and forth as he questions the witness. His wild white hair suggests the unexpected, and, indeed, he writes medieval history books on the side.

A decade ago, Sumption described his income as “puny” compared with that of, say, footballers. Then it was £1.6 million a year. Now it must be considerably more, although this is his last commercial case before he trades wealth for status and becomes a judge in the Supreme Court. There are even a couple of Sumption groupies, law students who beg to have their photograph taken with him.

He declines, politely, but is less polite to Berezovsky, accusing him three times on the same day of lying on oath: “I put it to you that you have just made that up ...” Faced with evidence that what he’s saying in court is not what he said in his witness statements, Berezovsky frowns: “It is not correct.”

The story they are arguing over began when the two oligarchs first met, in 1994, on a cruise in the Caribbean organised by a fellow Russian. Roman Abramovich was a 28 year-old who’d been a soldier and an importer of toy ducks, but was now doing well in the oil industry. His lawyer wrong-footed the opposition on the first day of this case by admitting that his wealth had been built up at a time when Russia was in chaos: “There was no rule of law. Police were corrupt. The courts were unpredictable at best – at worst open to manipulation by major political or economic interest groups. Nobody could go into business without access to political power.”

Meanwhile Berezovsky had also profited from the fall of Communism, turning himself from a maths professor into the owner of the largest car dealership in Russia. When they met, he was in the process of buying up newspapers and broadcasters with a view to supporting the re-election of his friend Boris Yeltsin. A member of the sport-loving president’s exclusive tennis club, he was also a close friend of Yeltsin’s daughter Tatiana and her husband.

Berezovsky told the court that Abramovich was “not smart”– but admitted he had still been impressed by the young man. “He is a genius in one respect: if he wants to convince someone, then you really believe in him and trust him.”

They discussed a plan to merge and privatise an oil-drilling company and a refinery in Siberia – and this is where their stories differ wildly. Berezovsky says it was agreed that he and his friend Arkady Patarkatsishvili – the richest man in Georgia – would get a quarter of the shares of the new business, which became known as Sibneft, and Abramovich the rest. Abramovich says there was no such agreement, and his opponent never had any shares at all.

He does admit to paying Berezovsky £800 million, but says this was in return for the older man acting as a political godfather, “indispensable to the construction of any major business”. The Russian term for it – krysha – translates literally as “roof”. Berezovsky says the word puts him in a bad light – and he once sued the magazine Forbes for suggesting he was a “corrupt gangster and murderer” – but Abramovich’s lawyers say he provided “not mob violence but political influence and patronage”.

The godfather persuaded President Yeltsin to hold an auction for rights in the two oil companies, then arranged to be the only bidder. “He then sold the benefit of that arrangement to Abramovich for money, which he used to fund [his media empire] and pay for a palace on the Côte d’Azur and other emblems of an exuberant lifestyle,” says the Abramovich team. “This may fairly be described as corrupt, but it has nothing to do with criminal violence.”

This is a startling admission – that a substantial part of their client’s wealth was achieved as a result of corruption. It also appears to put him in conflict with the Premier League’s rule that anyone who owns a football club should be a “fit and proper” person. In any case, Abramovich eventually sold his interests in Sibneft for £7.4 billion. Berezovsky has spent years trying to gain some of that, but in these early exchanges the defence seems to have the upper hand.

As another day comes to an end, Sumption puts the direct question: “The truth is, you never reached any agreement, did you?” And Berezovsky snaps back: “Everything. Completely. Wrong.”

The calm voice of Mrs Justice Gloster suggests they stop there for now. Out in the corridor, Roman Abramovich has torn off his tie. He doesn’t have to play by someone else’s rules any more.

The truth is, though, that choosing to settle the argument here opens up a rare portal for the rest of us into Roman Britain. For the next three months, any member of the public can go into Court 26, with no more security than might be found at an airport, and sit within touching distance of a man who spends his life out of reach. It’s no wonder that, as he walks back to his car with its tinted glass, Abramovich looks relieved.

Arquitecto wrote:This is the only problem with having corrupt owner as he will spend ludicrously for you but will also have his fair share of problems with the law.

Like berlu for us Milan fans