Kleptopia by Tom Burgis

Author:Tom Burgis [Burgis, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-07-17T00:00:00+00:00

34

Saint or Sinner

Paris, December 2016

In the chamber of justice, the juge rapporteur rose to her feet. Her role was not to reveal the court’s decision: that would only come at the end. She would read an account of the evidence the court had heard. But Peter Sahlas knew he would be able to detect from the way she chose to tell the story – which Mukhtar Ablyazov she selected as her protagonist – whether his version had supplanted Nazarbayev’s. He looked around the room. It was December 9, 2016. Americans had elected Trump, Brits had chosen Brexit, Russia had stolen a chunk of eastern Europe and no one had done much about it. The liberal order Peter had cherished since he was a boy back in Toronto, fought for by sneaking into a Czech barracks, by toiling to get Vasily Aleksanyan out of prison, by racing to Rome when a Kazakh kleptocrat kidnapped an enemy’s wife and child – that order had begun to die. Yet here, today, he was taking his seat on a velvet-cushioned bench in one of the temples of that order. In the hearing room of the conseil d’état, the highest French court for matters of government, the walls were royal red, topped with ornate mouldings of the symbols of justice: scales and sword, lamp and hourglass. An inscription read suum cuique: to each his due.

Peter looked across at Madina. It was she who was going to speak to her father on the prison phone to tell him the decision. Since Trefor Williams tracked him down to the mansion in Nice, Ablyazov had been held in French prisons, first in the south, then in Fleury-Mérogis, the dreaded hexagon in a bleak suburb of Paris where dangerous suspects were kept, including terrorists. That was what the Kazakhs were making Ablyazov out to be, by issuing vague warnings to European law enforcement agencies that the fugitive was so desperate he was plotting violence. The photographs of Ablyazov being driven to hearings on his extradition with an armed escort had become the stock images of the disgraced oligarch. Now he was entering his thirtieth month of incarceration, eight more than the British contempt of court sentence he had fled.

Back in May 2013, the morning after he had watched Madina crumple in the lobby of that Rome hotel as her kidnapped mother and sister landed in Kazakhstan, Peter had launched himself into the task of getting them back. That would involve somehow disproving the official line that this was just a routine deportation of illegal immigrants. He and some Italian lawyers interviewed everyone who had witnessed the two raids: the first one, to snatch Alma, then the second, when they came back for the girl. The police appeared to have shown little interest in establishing whether any crimes had actually been committed. They had drawn up no inventory of phones, iPads and other evidence they confiscated. That seemed like it might be enough to challenge the legality of the raid, so they filed a claim to do so.

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