How They Blew It by Jamie Oliver

Author:Jamie Oliver
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kogan Page

SOURCES

Bloomberg, 6 January 2009

Forbes magazine, 3 August 2007

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 10 December 2008

Evening Standard, 6 January 2009

HeidelbergCement, www.heidelbergcement.com and www.heidelbergcement.com/uk/en/hanson/home.htm

Independent, 9 January 2009

New York Times, 7 January 2009

Ratiopharm, www1.ratiopharm.com/ww/en/pub/home.cfm

Sunday Times, 11 January 2009

The Times, 8 January 2009

www.stadt-blaubeuren.de

Chapter Ten

Boris Berezovsky

– Exile

In the 1990s, Boris Berezovsky had the ear of the then president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin. Having the ear of a heavy-drinking president might not, in retrospect, be that impressive, but with Yeltsin in charge of a global superpower, Berezovsky had influence by association. When Yeltsin’s anointed successor took over, in the guise of Vladimir Putin, Berezovsky was expecting more of the same. He was wrong. Within days of coming to power in 2000, Putin promised to ‘liquidate the oligarchs as a class’. And by oligarchs, he meant the likes of Berezovsky. While this move could be interpreted as a positive, pro-Western European approach to cleaner politics, others argue it was simply a way of clearing the field of other likely pretenders to the Putin throne.

Whatever the motive, Berezovsky took the hint. He fled to the United Kingdom where, perhaps oddly, he was granted British citizenship and from where he changed his name to Platon Elenin. Quite why the British government was prepared to accommodate such a character remains unclear. Questions on the subject to the British Foreign Office are rapidly dispatched with a curt ‘no comment’.

Since 2001, Berezovsky has been provocateur number one, making threats to overthrow Putin, dismissing all manner of criminal allegations and fending off extradition orders to Russia. There remains an uneasy truce, although without doubt the Berezovsky story has further to run.

It is remarkable quite how far Berezovsky has come, but then has fallen. He was born in 1946, into a modest family in Moscow. A bright child, he went on to study forestry then applied mathematics, receiving a doctorate in computer science from Moscow State University in 1983, aged 37. He then worked on information management at the Academy of Sciences of the USSR before becoming a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1991. His first foray into business was possible under the ‘perestroika’ period of Russian politics towards the end of the 1980s. Its literal meaning is ‘restructuring’, as in the restructuring of the Soviet economy, and these were heady times. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was behind the move towards ‘demokratizatsiya’, a form of political democratization, and the changes to Russian life would be deep and far-reaching.

One of the key economic reforms was the Law on Cooperatives, enacted in May 1987, which for the first time since Lenin permitted private ownership of businesses in the services, manufacturing, and foreign trade sectors. For those with entrepreneurial ambition, it was a green light.

Berezovsky’s initial business dealings consisted of him and three friends going to West Germany, buying a used Mercedes and selling it on in Russia for three times what it cost. It didn’t take a mathematician to work out that this was good business, and Berezovsky soon returned to Germany and came back with four more cars.

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