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Londongrad: From Russia with Cash; The Inside Story of the Oligarchs
Mark Hollingsworth
Stewart Lansley
The amazing true story of how London became home to the Russian super-rich – told for the first time ever. A dazzling tale of incredible wealth, ferocious disputes, beautiful women, private jets, mega-yachts, the world’s best footballers – and chauffeur-driven Range Rovers with tinted windows.A group of buccaneering Russian oligarchs made colossal fortunes after the collapse of communism - and many of them came to London to enjoy their new-found wealth. Londongrad tells for the first time the true story of their journeys from Moscow and St Petersburg to mansions in Mayfair, Knightsbridge and Surrey - and takes you into a shimmering world of audacious multi-billion pound deals, outrageous spending and rancorous feuds.But while London's flashiest restaurants echoed to Russian laughter and Bond Street shop-owners totted up their profits, darker events also played themselves out. The killing of ex-KGB man Alexander Litvinenko in London to the death - in a helicopter crash he all but predicted - of Stephen Curtis, the lawyer to many of Britain's richest Russians, chilled London's Russians and many of those who know them.This is the story of how Russia's wealth was harvested and brought to London - some of it spent by Roman Abramovich on his beloved Chelsea Football Club, some of it spent by Boris Berezovsky in his battles with Russia's all-powerful Vladimir Putin. Londongrad is a must-read for anyone interested in how vast wealth is created, the luxury it can buy, and the power and intrigue it produces.
MARK HOLLINGSWORTH AND STEWART LANSLEY
LONDON GRAD
FROM RUSSIA WITH CASH
THE INSIDE STORY OF THE OLIGARCHS
‘There are no barriers to a rich man’
- Russian proverb
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#u527fceae-e591-558b-a1b9-4c4e603e38a8)
Title Page (#ud9591191-588e-51f3-a1fa-a59e08730f90)
Epigraph (#ue6b11061-6bbf-566c-9cee-4efeaa1bea34)
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS (#ubfeaeae5-721b-56c4-8982-6b3288364988)
CHAPTER 1 The Man Who Knew Too Much (#u219419f1-1f2f-5f7f-8eee-480615be811b)
CHAPTER 2 The Russian Billionaires’ Club (#u47fe73b0-c40a-56ab-9178-fb81bee5a3b8)
CHAPTER 3 Putin’s Purge (#uab50dca5-e049-5022-b6d1-d383e5cd9e63)
CHAPTER 4 Hiding the Money (#uba2fa31a-96db-55f0-9bed-86a98ba83188)
CHAPTER 5 The Russians Have Landed (#u1351bc9f-e4c7-5efb-b410-360ebafab94b)
CHAPTER 6 Boys with Toys (#uaaf493f3-7383-5bfe-9e6d-4cc26b7c0bc1)
CHAPTER 7 The Big Game Hunters (#u7b4ec10b-9118-53ce-84fd-3907cd458b17)
CHAPTER 8 The Curse of Yukos (#u9fde4076-7d95-5c2b-b3f2-30aa20c477c4)
CHAPTER 9 Plotting Revolution (#uad4a5e5a-3d60-5c3e-bbc7-b8444265aebc)
CHAPTER 10 Murder Inc. (#ua763c421-e529-5057-8e76-a2496fcc5cfe)
CHAPTER 11 Showdown (#u906563ee-666a-567e-a55f-75242c788bea)
CHAPTER 12 Paint the Town Red (#ub5fcee46-0713-5f6d-a0ff-1541faa90f9d)
BIBLIOGRAPHY (#uf644cc3f-2a8f-54ba-8899-5229c9b70fc5)
NOTES (#u6586966e-a2f3-55d3-9707-24dd5cab31d0)
INDEX (#u217febb4-be97-57b5-a429-9cccb73cebec)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS (#u91a5b0d9-0279-5511-9b6f-ed0591f40bc6)
Photo Insert (#ub11fbd19-12b5-59f4-b75b-025f18003379)
Also by Mark Hollingsworth and Stewart Lansley (#ue127668e-6470-50c0-8ec8-2ac98da7e40a)
Copyright (#u33fc8905-edcc-5870-8273-c1071702346a)
About the Publisher (#ucbcce8b6-eb53-514a-95a8-32a35669d7b6)
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS (#ulink_776ec24c-b3bd-5c56-a348-104702381591)
Roman Abramovich and Daria Zhukova © Big Pictures
Chelsea win the Premier League © Reuters
Mikhail Khodorkovsky © Camera Press
Vladimir Putin and Oleg Deripaska © PA
Boris Yeltsin and Boris Berezovsky © PA
Boris Berezovsky in Surrey © Camera Press
Alexander Lebedev, Mikhail Gorbachev and Bono © Getty Images
Evgeny Lebedev, Mikhail Gorbachev and Geordie Greig © Getty Images
Naomi Campbell and Vladimir Doronin © Big Pictures
Pelorus in St Petersburg © PA
Helicopter in Sardinia © Big Pictures
Roman Abramovich’s Boeing 767 © Rex Features
Natalia Vodianova and Justin Portman © PA
Damien Hirst and Daria Zhukova © Getty Images
Christian Candy and Nick Candy © Getty Images
Prince Michael of Kent © Camera Press
Lord Bell © Camera Press
Nat Rothschild © Getty Images
George Osborne © PA
Queen K © Getty Images
Lord Mandelson © Camera Press
Stephen Curtis © PA
Pennsylvania Castle © Rex Features
Helicopter crash site © Rex Features
Alexander Litvinenko’s FSB credentials © Litvinenko/PA
Alexander Litvinenko © PA
Alexander Litvinenko in hospital © Getty Images
Anna Politkovskaya © PA
Paul Klebnikov © PA
Andrei Lugovoi © Corbis
Badri Patarkatsishvili and Boris Berezovsky © PA
Fyning Hill estate © Getty Images
Oleg Deripaska’s London home © Rex Features
Russian women in London © Aleksei Kudikov/Eventica
Russian gathering in Trafalgar Square © Aleksei Kudikov/Eventica
Ksenia Sobchak © Landov
Polina Deripaska, Tatyana Dyachenko, Valentin Yumashev © Landov
Dmitri Medvedev © Nikas Safronov
Vladimir Putin © Nikas Safronov
Chocolate heads © Getty
CHAPTER 1 The Man Who Knew Too Much (#ulink_26a1e95d-5107-5dcb-a16f-58983eba5ea2)
‘I have dug myself into a hole and I am in too deep. I am not sure that I can dig myself out’
- STEPHEN CURTIS, January 2004
6.56 P.M., WEDNESDAY, 3 MARCH 2004. A brand-new white six-seater £.5-million Agusta A109E helicopter lands under an overcast sky at Battersea heliport in south-west London. Waiting impatiently on the tarmac and clutching his two unregistered mobile phones is a broad-shouldered 45-year-old British lawyer named Stephen Curtis. He is not in the best of moods. Three minutes earlier he had called Nigel Brown, Managing Director of ISC Global Ltd, which provided security for him, regarding disputed invoices sent to a Russian client. ‘This is causing problems!’ he shouted and then paused. ‘Look, I have to go now. The helicopter is here.’
Curtis climbs aboard the helicopter and manoeuvres his bulky frame into the passenger cabin’s left rear seat. A member of the ground staff places his three pieces of hand luggage on the seat in front of him and the pilot is given departure clearance. At 6.59 p.m. the chopper lifts off into the gloomy London sky. It is cold and misty with broken cloud at 3,800 feet, but conditions are reasonable for flying with visibility of 7 kilometres.
The lawyer turns off his mobile phones and sits back. After a day of endless and stressful phone calls from his £4 million luxury penthouse apartment at Waterside Point in nearby Battersea, he is looking forward to a relaxing evening at home at Pennsylvania Castle, his eighteenth-century retreat on the island of Portland off the Dorset coast.
By the time the helicopter approaches Bournemouth Airport, after a flight of less than one hour, it is raining lightly and the runway is obscured by cloud. The Agusta is cleared to land and descends via Stoney Cross to the north-east where, despite the gloom, the lights of the cars on the A27 are now visible in the early evening darkness. The pilot, Captain Max Radford, an experienced 34-year-old local man who regularly flies Curtis to and from London, radios air traffic control for permission to land on runway twenty-six.
‘Echo Romeo,’ replies Kirsty Holtan, the air traffic controller. ‘Just check that you are visual with the field.’
‘Er, negative. Not this time. Echo Romeo.’
The air traffic controller can only see the helicopter on her remote radar monitor. Concerned, she increases the runway lighting to maximum intensity. This has the required effect and a mile from the airport the pilot radios: ‘Just becoming visual this time.’
‘Golf Echo Romeo. Do you require radar?’ asks Holtan.
‘Yes, yes,’ replies Radford, his voice now strained; he repeats the word no less than eleven times in quick succession.
Suddenly, the chopper descends sharply to the left. It then swings around almost out of control. Within seconds it has fallen 400 feet. ‘Golf Echo Romeo. Is everything O.K.?’ asks a concerned Holtan.
‘Negative, negative,’ replies Radford.
They are just 1.5 kilometres east of the threshold of runway twenty-six when the height readout is lost on the radar. For the next fifty-six seconds the pilot confirms that he has power but then suddenly, frantically, radios: ‘We have a problem, we have a problem.’ As the chopper loses power, at 7.41 p.m. Radford shouts down the open mike: ‘O.K., I need a climb, I need a climb.’
Radford hears a low horn, warning that the speed of the main rotor blades has dropped. He keeps his finger on the radio button and can be heard struggling to turn out of a dive, but he has lost control. ‘No. No!’ he shouts in a panic. They are his last words.
The helicopter, now in free fall, nose dives into a field at high speed and explodes on impact, sending a fireball 30 feet into the air. The aircraft is engulfed in flames, with the debris of the wreckage strewn across a quarter of a mile. ‘I heard a massive bang and rushed up to the window and just saw this big firewall in front of me,’ recalled Sarah Price, who lives beneath the flight path. ‘The whole field appeared to be on fire. It was horrific.’
Some thirty-five firefighters rush to the scene, but the two men aboard - Stephen Curtis and Max Radford - die instantly. Later that night their charred bodies are taken to the mortuary at Boscombe, Dorset, where an autopsy is performed the following day. Their corpses are so badly burnt that they can only be identified using DNA samples taken by Wing Commander Maidment at the RAF Centre of Aviation Medicine at Henlow in Bedfordshire.
The news of Curtis’s dramatic death was not only deeply traumatic to his wife and daughter, it also sent shock waves through the sinister world of the Russian oligarchs, the Kremlin, and a group of bankers and accountants working in the murky offshore world where billions of pounds are regularly moved and hidden across multiple continents. That was not all. Alarm bells were also ringing in the offices of Britain’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies, for Stephen Curtis was no ordinary lawyer. Since the 1990s he had been the covert custodian of some of the vast personal fortunes made from the controversial privatization of the country’s giant state enterprises. Two of his billionaire clients - Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Boris Berezovsky - had entrusted Curtis to protect and firewall their wealth from scrutiny by the Russian authorities.
The Russians liked and trusted the highly intelligent, gregarious Curtis. Generous, a heavy drinker, loyal, amusing, and extravagant, he slipped naturally into their world. Also impatient, ruthless, and aggressive when required, he restructured their companies, moved their funds between a bewildering series of bank accounts lodged in obscure island tax havens, established complex trusts, and set up an elaborate offshore ownership of their assets. On their arrival in London he found them properties, introduced them to the most powerful bankers, entertained them late into the night, and recommended private schools for their children and even Savile Row tailors for their suits.
By early 2004, Curtis had not only introduced his wealthy new Russian clients to many aspects of British life, but he was also the guardian of many of their secrets. He was the only person who could identify and unravel the opaque ownership of their assets - property, yachts, art, cars, jewellery, and private jets as well as their bank accounts, shareholdings, companies, and trusts. ‘Stephen knew everything because he set up their whole infrastructure,’ said a close friend. He salted away billions of pounds in an intricate, sophisticated financial maze, which the Russian government later tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to unravel.
Operating from his office in a narrow, four-storey Mayfair house at 94 Park Lane, Curtis found that working for oligarchs was also lucrative. The product of a relatively modest upbringing himself, Curtis amassed a sizeable personal fortune from his new clients, enough to enable him to acquire his own helicopter, a private aircraft, and a penthouse apartment in London, as well as Pennsylvania Castle. He donated substantial sums to charity, entertained his friends at the castle, and hosted expensive holidays in the Caribbean.
But Stephen Curtis was a lawyer who knew too much. Although he loved flirting with risk and thrived on the pressure and excitement of working with the Russians, he also became increasingly nervous about his own vulnerability and the safety of his family. At the time of his death he was caught in the middle of an epic power struggle, one of the highest-stakes contests between state and business ascendancy in the world - between the most powerful man in Russia, President Vladimir Putin, and its wealthiest businessman, Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
By October 2003, Curtis had been working for Khodorkovsky for six years when his billionaire client was arrested at gunpoint in central Siberia for alleged massive tax evasion and fraud. A month later the Mayfair lawyer found himself further embroiled in the conflict when he was appointed chairman of the Gibraltar-based Menatep, the bank that controlled Yukos, Khodorkovsky’s $15 billion oil company. Russian newspapers suddenly began referring to a ‘mystery man’ in Gibraltar who controlled Russia’s second-biggest oil producer. Billions of pounds were at stake, the political survival of Putin was in the balance, and Curtis was billed to play a pivotal role in the forthcoming court drama.
In March 2004 the trial of Khodorkovsky was imminent and the pressure on Curtis was intense. On the morning after his death on 3 March, the offices of two Swiss companies connected to Yukos were raided by Swiss police at the request of the Russian prosecutors. Documents were seized, suspects were interviewed in Geneva, Zurich, and Freiberg, and Swiss bank accounts containing $5 billion were frozen.
