Kitabı oku: «Putin’s People»

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

List of Illustrations

Dramatis Personae

Prologue

PART ONE

1. ‘Operation Luch’

2. Inside Job

3. ‘The Tip of an Iceberg’

4. Operation Successor: ‘It Was Already After Midnight’

5. ‘Children’s Toys in Pools of Mud’

PART TWO

6. ‘The Inner Circle Made Him’

7. ‘Operation Energy’

8. Out of Terror, an Imperial Awakening

9. ‘Appetite Comes During Eating’

PART THREE

10. Obschak

11. Londongrad

12. The Battle Begins

13. Black Cash

14. Soft Power in an Iron Fist – ‘I Call Them the Orthodox Taliban’

15. The Network and Donald Trump

Epilogue

Picture Section

Notes

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

Illustrations

Vladimir Putin’s identity card as a Stasi officer

Putin in his Dresden days

Putin, Lyudmilla and Katerina, or Katya, in August 1986 (Sovfoto/Universal Images Group/Getty Images)

Sergei Pugachev and Pavel Borodin

Boris Yeltsin and Yevgeny Primakov (Itar Tass/Pool/Shutterstock)

Yeltsin’s daughter, Tatyana Dyachenko, and her husband Valentin Yumashev (Shutterstock)

Yeltsin handing over the presidency to Putin, 31 December 1999 (AFP/AFP via Getty Images)

Putin shaking hands with Pugachev

Putin with Nikolai Patrushev (Alexey Panov/AFP via Getty Images)

Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Boris Berezovsky (Alexei Kondratyev/AP/Shutterstock)

Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev facing trial in 2005 (Shutterstock)

Igor Sechin and Gennady Timchenko (Sputnik/TopFoto)

Yury Kovalchuk (Alexander Nikolayev/AFP via Getty Images)

Dmitry Firtash (Simon Dawson/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Martin Schlaff (STR/AFP via Getty Images)

Konstantin Malofeyev (Sergei Malgavko\TASS via Getty Images)

Putin comforting Lyudmilla Narusova at the funeral of Anatoly Sobchak (Sputnik/Alamy)

Putin at his inauguration as president in May 2000 (AFP via Getty Images)

The evacuation of Moscow’s Dubrovka theatre (Anton Denisov/AFP via Getty Images)

Putin reacting to the Dubrovka theatre evacuation (AFP via Getty Images)

A dinner party at Putin’s dacha, including Pugachev, Shevkunov, Sechin and Patrushev

Putin and Lyudmilla welcomed by Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip during a state visit to the UK (© Pool Photograph/Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images)

Mourners at the school in Beslan where 330 hostages died in a terrorist attack (Shutterstock)

The school gymnasium in Beslan (Shutterstock)

Semyon Mogilevich (Alexey Filippov/TASS via Getty Images)

Moscow police raiding the dacha of Sergei Mikhailov (Kommersant Photo Agency/SIPA USA/PA)

Vladimir Yakunin (Mikhail Metzel\TASS via Getty Images)

Roman Abramovich at a Chelsea football match (AMA/Corbis via Getty Images)

Putin sheds a tear speaking after his reelection in 2012 (Natalia Kolesnikova/AFP via Getty Images)

Gennady Timchenko and Putin playing hockey (Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images)

Donald Trump inside his Taj Mahal casino (Joe Dombroski/Newsday RM via Getty Images)

Donald Trump with Tevfik Arif and Felix Sater (Mark Von Holden/WireImage)

Dramatis Personae

Putin’s inner circle, the siloviki

Igor Sechin – Putin’s trusted gatekeeper, a former KGB operative from St Petersburg who rose in power as deputy head of Putin’s Kremlin to lead the state takeover of the Russian oil sector. Later became known as ‘Russia’s Darth Vader’ for his ruthless propensity for plots.

Nikolai Patrushev – Powerful former head of the Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor agency to the KGB, and current Security Council chief.

Viktor Ivanov – Former KGB officer who served with Putin in the Leningrad KGB and oversaw personnel as deputy head of Putin’s Kremlin during his first term, leading the Kremlin’s initial expansion into the economy.

Viktor Cherkesov – Former senior KGB officer who ran the St Petersburg FSB and was a mentor to Putin, moving with him to Moscow, where he remained a close adviser, first as first deputy head of the FSB and then running the Federal Drugs Service.

Sergei Ivanov – Former Leningrad KGB officer who became one of the youngest ever generals in Russia’s foreign-intelligence service in the nineties and then rose in power under Putin’s presidency, first as defence minister and then as Kremlin chief of staff.

Dmitry Medvedev – Former lawyer who started out working as a deputy to Putin in the St Petersburg administration when he was in his early twenties, and followed closely in Putin’s footsteps thereafter: first as a deputy head of the Kremlin administration, then as its chief of staff, then as Putin’s interim replacement as president.

The custodians, the KGB-connected businessmen

Gennady Timchenko – Alleged former KGB operative who rose through the ranks of Soviet trade to become co-founder of one of the first independent traders of oil products before the Soviet fall. Worked closely with Putin from the early nineties, and according to some associates, before the Soviet collapse.

Yury Kovalchuk – Former physicist who joined with other KGB-connected businessmen to take over Bank Rossiya, a St Petersburg bank that, according to the US Treasury, became the ‘personal bank’ for Putin and other senior Russian officials.

Arkady Rotenberg – Former Putin judo partner who became a billionaire under Putin’s presidency after the state awarded his companies multi-billion-dollar construction contracts.

Vladimir Yakunin – Former senior KGB officer who served a stint undercover at the United Nations in New York, then joined with Kovalchuk in taking over Bank Rossiya. Putin anointed him chief of the state railways monopoly.

‘The Family’, the coterie of relatives, officials and businessmen closely surrounding the first Russian president, Boris Yeltsin

Valentin Yumashev – Former journalist who gained Yeltsin’s trust while writing his memoirs, and was anointed Kremlin chief of staff in 1997. Married Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana in 2002.

Tatyana Dyachenko – Yeltsin’s daughter who officially served as his image adviser, but was essentially gatekeeper to the president.

Boris Berezovsky – Former mathematician who made his fortune running trading schemes for carmaker AvtoVAZ, the producer of the boxy Zhiguli car that epitomised the Soviet era, and inveigled his way into the good graces of Yeltsin and his Family. When he acquired the Sibneft oil major, he became the epitome of the intensely politically-wired oligarchs of the Yeltsin era.

Alexander Voloshin – Former economist who started out working with Berezovsky on privatisations and other schemes, and was transferred to the Kremlin in 1997 to work as Yumashev’s deputy chief of staff. Promoted to chief of staff in 1999.

Roman Abramovich – Oil trader who became Berezovsky’s protégé and later outmanoeuvred him to take over Berezovsky’s business empire. ‘Cashier’ to the Yeltsin Family and then to Putin.

Sergei Pugachev – Russian Orthodox banker who was a master of the Byzantine financing schemes of Yeltsin’s Kremlin, and then became known as Putin’s banker too. Co-founder of Mezhprombank, he straddled the worlds of the Family and the siloviki.

The Yeltsin-era oligarch who crossed Putin’s men

Mikhail Khodorkovsky – Former member of the Communist Youth League who became one of Russia’s first and most successful businessmen of the perestroika era and the 1990s.

The mobsters, footsoldiers for the KGB

St Petersburg

Ilya Traber – Former Soviet submariner who became a black-market antiques trader in the perestroika years, and then an intermediary between Putin’s security services and the Tambov organised-crime group, controlling St Petersburg’s most strategic assets, the sea port and the oil terminal.

Vladimir Kumarin – Tambov organised-crime boss who lost an arm in an assassination attempt and became known as St Petersburg’s ‘night governor’, joining in business with Putin’s men, most notably with Ilya Traber.

Moscow

Semyon Mogilevich – Former wrestler, known as ‘the Brainy Don’, who at the end of the eighties became banker to the leaders of Russia’s most powerful organised-crime groups, including the Solntsevskaya, funnelling cash into the West and setting up a criminal empire of drugs and arms trafficking of his own. Recruited in the seventies by the KGB, he was ‘the criminal arm of the Russian state’.

Sergei Mikhailov – Alleged head of the Solntsevskaya organised-crime group, Moscow’s most powerful, with close ties to many of the KGB-connected businessmen who later cultivated connections with New York property mogul Donald Trump.

Vyacheslav Ivankov (‘Yaponchik’) – Mobster dispatched by Mogilevich to Brighton Beach, New York, to oversee the Solntsevskaya’s criminal empire there.

Yevgeny Dvoskin – Brighton Beach mobster who became one of Russia’s most notorious ‘shadow bankers’ after moving back to Moscow with his uncle, Ivankov, joining forces with the Russian security services to funnel tens of billions of dollars in ‘black cash’ into the West.

Felix Sater – Dvoskin’s best friend since childhood. Became a key business partner of the Trump Organization, developing a string of properties for Trump, all the while retaining high-level contacts in Russian intelligence.

Prologue
Moscow Rules

It was late in the evening in May 2015, and Sergei Pugachev was flicking through an old family photo album he’d found from thirteen years ago or more. In one photo from a birthday party at his Moscow dacha, his son Viktor keeps his eyes downcast as Vladimir Putin’s daughter Maria smiles and whispers in his ear. In another, Viktor and his other son, Alexander, are posing on a wooden spiral staircase in the Kremlin presidential library with Putin’s two daughters. At the edge of the photo, Lyudmilla Putina, then still the Russian president’s wife, smiles.

We were sitting in the kitchen of Pugachev’s latest residence, a three-storey townhouse in the well-heeled London area of Chelsea. The late-evening light glanced in through the cathedral-sized windows, and birds chirped in the trees outside, the traffic from the nearby King’s Road a faint hum. The high-powered life Pugachev had once enjoyed in Moscow – the dealmaking, the endless behind-the-scenes agreements, the ‘understandings’ between friends in the Kremlin corridors of power – seemed a world away. But Moscow’s influence was in fact still lurking like a shadow outside his door.

The day before, Pugachev had been forced to seek the protection of the UK counter-terrorism squad. His bodyguards had found suspicious-looking boxes with protruding wires taped to the undercarriage of his Rolls-Royce, as well as on the car used to transport his three youngest children, aged seven, five and three, to school. Now, on the wall of the Pugachevs’ sitting room, behind the rocking horse and across from the family portraits, the SO15 counter-terrorism squad had installed a grey box containing an alarm that could be activated in the event of attack.

Fifteen years before, Pugachev had been a Kremlin insider who’d manoeuvred endlessly behind the scenes to help bring Vladimir Putin to power. Once known as the Kremlin’s banker, he’d been a master of the backroom deals, the sleights of hand that governed the country then. For years he’d seemed untouchable, a member of an inner circle at the pinnacle of power that had made and bent the rules to suit themselves, with law enforcement, the courts, and even elections subverted for their needs. But now the Kremlin machine he’d once been part of had turned against him. The tall, Russian Orthodox believer with a dark beard and a gregarious grin had become the latest victim of Putin’s relentlessly expanding reach. First, the Kremlin had moved in on his business empire, taking it for itself. Pugachev had left Russia, first for France and then for England as the Kremlin launched its attack. Putin’s men had taken the hotel project the president had granted him on Red Square, a stone’s throw from the Kremlin, without any compensation at all. Then his shipyards, two of the biggest in Russia, valued at $3.5 billion, were acquired by one of Putin’s closest allies, Igor Sechin, for a fraction of that sum. Then his coal project, the world’s biggest coking-coal deposit in the Siberian region of Tuva, valued at $4 billion, was taken by a close associate of Ramzan Kadyrov, the strongman Chechen president, for $150 million.[1]

In the process, Putin’s men had blamed him for the collapse of Mezhprombank, the bank he co-founded long ago in the nineties that had once been the key to his power. The Kremlin authorities had opened a criminal case claiming Pugachev had caused the bank’s bankruptcy by transferring $700 million from it to a Swiss bank account at the height of the 2008 financial crisis. The Kremlin paid no regard to Pugachev’s claims that the money was his own. It seemed to matter little that the takeover of the shipyards by Sechin at a fraction of their value was the biggest reason for the shortfall in the bank’s funds to creditors.[2]

The hand of the Kremlin seemed clear. ‘People within the state manipulated the rules against him in order to bring the bank down, unsurprisingly benefiting themselves,’ said Richard Hainsworth, a long-standing Russian banking expert.[3]

It was a typical story for a Kremlin machine that had become relentless in its reach. First, it had gone after political enemies. But now it was starting to turn on Putin’s one-time allies. Pugachev was the first of the inner circle to fall. And now the Kremlin had expanded its campaign against him from the brutal closed-door courts of Moscow to the veneer of respectability of London’s High Court. There, it obtained a freezing order against his assets with ease, tying the tycoon up in knots in the courtroom along the way.

Ever since Pugachev had left Russia, the Kremlin had pursued him. At his home in France, he’d been threatened by stooges sent by Mezhprombank’s liquidator. Three members of a Moscow mafia group had taken him out to a yacht off the coast of Nice and demanded he pay $350 million to guarantee his family’s ‘safety’. It was ‘the price of peace’, they told him, the price for making the Russian criminal case against him for the Mezhprom bankruptcy go away, documentary evidence shows.[4] In the UK courts, Pugachev had been a fish totally out of water, incapable of operating according to their unfamiliar rules and procedures. He was too accustomed to the backroom deals of his Kremlin past, too accustomed to slipping through the net of rules and regulations because of his position and power. He hadn’t done himself any favours. Convinced of the righteousness of his position, that he was the victim of the latest Kremlin asset grab, he believed himself above the regulations of the British courts. He’d failed to stick to court orders related to the asset freeze, and had burned through millions of pounds from an account he’d kept hidden from the UK court. He believed the disclosure rules were beneath him, petty compared to the calamity that had befallen his business empire, and no more than part of a Kremlin campaign to hound and frustrate him at every turn. The Kremlin, however, had become adept at pursuing its enemies through the UK court system, while a PR machine was honed to fill the pages of the UK tabloids with allegations of the Russian oligarch’s stolen wealth.

The Kremlin had first learned to navigate its way through the UK court system during its victory against Boris Berezovsky, the exiled oligarch who’d become Putin’s fiercest critic, in a case that seemed to turn Russian history on its head. Berezovsky was the fast-talking one-time Kremlin insider who had tried – and failed – to sue his erstwhile business partner Roman Abramovich, a close Kremlin ally, for $6.5 billion in London’s High Court. The judge overseeing the case, Dame Elizabeth Gloster, had taken a dim view of Berezovsky’s claim that he’d jointly owned one of Russia’s biggest oil majors, Sibneft, and a stake in Rusal, Russia’s biggest aluminium giant, with Abramovich, and that Abramovich had forced him to sell his stakes at a knockdown price. Though Berezovsky was recognised throughout Russia as owner of these concerns, Mrs Justice Gloster said she found him to be ‘an inhererently unreliable witness’,[5] and sided with Abramovich, who’d claimed that Berezovsky had never owned these assets; he’d merely been paid for providing political patronage. Later, it turned out that Mrs Justice Gloster’s stepson had been paid nearly £500,000 to represent Abramovich in the early stages of the case. Berezovsky’s lawyers claimed his involvement was more extensive than had previously been disclosed.[6]

The Kremlin had further honed its operations in the UK court system through its pursuit of Mukhtar Ablyazov, a Kazakh billionaire who happened to be the biggest political foe of the Kazakh president, a key Kremlin ally, Nursultan Nazarbayev. Ablyazov was pursued by Russia’s state deposit insurance agency, which charged him with siphoning more than $4 billion from the Kazakh BTA Bank, of which he had been chairman, and which had branches across Russia. The Russian agency hired a team of lawyers from the top London law firm Hogan Lovells, who launched eleven civil fraud lawsuits against Ablyazov in the UK, as well as a freezing order on his assets. Private detectives had traced the siphoned $4 billion to a network of offshore companies controlled by the Kazakh tycoon.[7]

But in Pugachev’s case, no stolen or hidden assets appeared to have been found. No fraud claims had ever been launched in the UK, or anywhere else outside Russia. Instead, on the basis of a Russian court ruling alone, the same team from Hogan Lovells had won the freezing order against Pugachev’s assets, and ably ran rings around him while he chafed at the multitude of court orders that came his way. He’d been interrogated over asset disclosures, and found to have given false evidence over whether the sale of his coal business had been conducted by himself or by his son. It didn’t seem to matter to the judge that the sale had been forced through at a price that was less than one twentieth of the business’s real value. What mattered was whether he’d followed procedure and declared all the assets that remained under his control. Pugachev had been forced to hand over his passports to the court, and was banned from leaving the UK during a prolonged period of questioning over his asset disclosures as the Kremlin’s lawyers tightened the legal net. He’d run through a series of lawyers who in turn seemed baffled by a case that had never been heard on its merits in the UK, while others viewed him mendaciously as easy prey. Spoilt by the flood of Russian cases that Moscow’s tycoons were willing to pay top prices for airing in London’s High Court, legal firms padded their bills to astronomical sums for work that was never done, as documents show. PR firms offered to defend Pugachev’s image for £100,000 a month. ‘He’s on our territory now,’ said one partner at a global law firm representing him.

At first Pugachev had believed the case against him was being driven by unruly Kremlin underlings anxious to draw a line over their expropriation of his business empire. But as the campaign expanded, and Pugachev began to fear for his physical safety, he became convinced that it was being guided by Putin himself. ‘How could he do this to me? I even made him president,’ he said that evening as he sat in his Chelsea kitchen, still shell-shocked by the visit from SO15 and the suspicious devices found underneath his cars.[8] A former friend sent by the Kremlin to London had told him that Putin was personally managing every step of the campaign against him, warning: ‘We have control of everything here, we’ve got everything all stitched up.’

Pugachev had long detected the growing influence of Kremlin cash in London. Long before the legal attack started, he said, he’d met a string of English lords who’d guffawed and shaken his hand, and told him how great they thought Putin was. In those days they believed Pugachev was ‘Putin’s banker’, as the press had called him then, yet they’d still asked him to donate to the Conservative Party without any question or thought. All his former friends from the Kremlin kept relatives and mistresses in town, who they visited at weekends, flooding the city with cash. There was Sechin’s ex-wife, Marina, who kept a house with her daughter here. There was Igor Shuvalov, the deputy prime minister, who owned the most prestigious flat in the city, a penthouse overlooking Trafalgar Square. There were the sons of Arkady Rotenberg, Putin’s billionaire former judo partner, who attended one of the country’s most vaunted private schools, while his ex-wife Natalya shopped and sued her husband for divorce in London’s High Court. There was the deputy speaker of the State Duma, one of Russia’s most vocal patriots, Sergei Zheleznyak, who’d long raged against the influence of the West, yet his daughter Anastasia had lived in London for years. The list of officials resident in London was endless, said Pugachev. ‘They have sorted themselves out very well on this small island with terrible weather,’ he sniffed. ‘In the UK, the main thing was always money. Putin sent his agents to corrupt the British elite.’

The city had grown used to the flood of Russian cash. Property prices had surged as first tycoons and then Russian officials had bought up high-end mansions in Knightsbridge, Kensington and Belgravia. A string of Russian share offerings, led by the state’s Rosneft, Sberbank and VTB, had helped pay the rents and wages for the offices of London’s well-heeled PR and legal firms. Lords and former politicians were paid lavish salaries to serve on Russian companies’ boards, although they were granted little oversight of corporate conduct. Russia’s influence was everywhere. Alexander Lebedev, the former KGB officer and banker who’d positioned himself as a champion of the free press in Russia, had acquired London’s most-read and influential daily, the Evening Standard, becoming a fixture at the capital’s soirées and on the lists for the most sought-after dinner invitations. Another was Dmitry Firtash, a Ukrainian tycoon who’d become the Kremlin’s gas trader of choice, and who despite his links to a major Russian mobster wanted by the FBI, Semyon Mogilevich, had become a billionaire donor to Cambridge University. His chief London minion, Robert Shetler-Jones, had donated millions of pounds to the Tories, while influential party grandees served on the board of Firtash’s British Ukrainian Society. There were other less noticeable players. At least one of them had slipped through the cracks to become close friends with Boris Johnson, then London’s mayor, at the top of the Tory elite. ‘Everyone has gotten used to spies wearing dark glasses and looking suspicious in films,’ said Pugachev. ‘But here they are everywhere. They look normal. You can’t tell.’

Pugachev had no idea whether the envoy sent by the Kremlin to warn him that it had everything stitched up in the UK was telling the truth, or whether he’d been sent merely to frighten him. But at some point – after he found the suspicious-looking devices on his cars, and after he first got wind that Russia was going to seek his extradition from the UK – he decided he didn’t want to risk waiting to find out. Despite his previous closeness to Putin, and his extensive contacts with the Kremlin’s clan of former KGB men known as the siloviki, a meeting set up for him with a top-level official from the British Foreign Office had been cancelled at the last minute. Instead he’d been told by a visiting Kremlin agent that he should meet a man Russian intelligence had cultivated in MI6. Everything was being turned on its head. He feared that the UK government was preparing a deal with the Russians to extradite him. He wondered too about the fate of his friend Boris Berezovsky, the arch Kremlin critic who in March 2013 had been found dead on the floor of his bathroom in his country mansion in Berkshire, his favourite black cashmere scarf round his neck, an unidentified fingerprint left at the scene. For some unknown reason, Scotland Yard didn’t investigate, leaving it to the local Thames Valley Police, which called it a suicide and closed the case.[9] ‘It looks like there is an agreement with Russia not to make a fuss,’ Pugachev worried.[10]

And so one day in June 2015, a few weeks after we’d met in his Chelsea home, Pugachev was suddenly no longer in the UK. His phones had all been switched off, ditched by the wayside as he ran. He’d ignored the court orders forbidding him to leave the country. He hadn’t even told his partner, the mother of his three young children, the London socialite Alexandra Tolstoy, who was left waiting late into the night for him to appear at her father’s eightieth birthday party. He’d last been 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]