Londongrad: From Russia with Cash; The Inside Story of the Oligarchs

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

Title Page

Epigraph

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

CHAPTER 1 The Man Who Knew Too Much

CHAPTER 2 The Russian Billionaires’ Club

CHAPTER 3 Putin’s Purge

CHAPTER 4 Hiding the Money

CHAPTER 5 The Russians Have Landed

CHAPTER 6 Boys with Toys

CHAPTER 7 The Big Game Hunters

CHAPTER 8 The Curse of Yukos

CHAPTER 9 Plotting Revolution

CHAPTER 10 Murder Inc.

CHAPTER 11 Showdown

CHAPTER 12 Paint the Town Red

BIBLIOGRAPHY

NOTES

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Photo Insert

Also by Mark Hollingsworth and Stewart Lansley

Copyright

About the Publisher

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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

‘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.

Moreover, just a few weeks earlier Curtis had taken another critical and high-risk decision: to cooperate covertly with British police officials. Until only recently a back-room lawyer (secretive, low profile, discreet), he found himself suddenly thrust into the spotlight as chairman of a highly controversial Russian company. Sensitive and highly strung at the best of times, he felt increasingly exposed in this new role. Sooner or later he feared the Russian authorities would come knocking on his door asking questions about his own role in alleged tax avoidance and the filtering of cash out of the country.

As he was legally obliged, Curtis had been scrupulous in reporting ‘suspicious transactions’, or the merest hint of criminal activity, to the National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS) at Scotland Yard, which investigates money laundering and organized crime. In May 2003, for example, he had filed a suspicious transaction report about one of his Russian clients. Now he needed protection for another reason: he feared that he might become the target of commercial enemies - rival oil companies and minority investors of Yukos who claimed that they were being defrauded. He also knew that contract killings in Russia were commonplace. ‘I have dug myself into a hole and I am in too deep,’ he told a colleague. ‘I am not sure that I can dig myself out.’

In the last few weeks of his life Curtis was under constant surveillance by commercial and Russian state investigators and was considering moving offices. His telephones were tapped and in early 2004 his security consultants discovered a small magnet used to secure a listening device at his country home in Dorset. According to Eric Jenkins, an uncle who often visited him in Gibraltar, where his nephew lived for most of the year, Curtis received numerous anonymous threats and intimidating phone calls. He took them seriously enough to hire a bodyguard. ‘There certainly were death threats against Stephen,’ confirmed Nigel Brown, whose company also provided security for Curtis’s clients Berezovsky and Khodorkovsky. ‘The timing of his death was very suspicious and there were people out there who had a motive to kill him. He just knew too much.’

At first Curtis dismissed the threats, but when one phone call mentioned his wife and 13-year-old daughter, he decided to act. In mid-February 2004, deeply worried, he approached the Foreign Office and NCIS and offered full but covert cooperation. He would provide information about Russian commercial activities in Britain and the oligarchs’ assets, in return for protection for himself and his family. Up to that point his relationship with NCIS had been a limited, almost standard form of cooperation, a role many solicitors play. For NCIS Curtis was a potentially prized informant with insider knowledge of controversial Russian business activity in London. He was immediately assigned a controller, but after only two meetings the NCIS officer was transferred to another operation. Curtis asked to be assigned another controller but before this was done, he was dead.

A week before the fatal crash Curtis had told a close friend at his apartment at Waterside Point, ‘If anything happens to me in the next few weeks, it will not be an accident.’ He had laughed nervously but he was not joking. He had played the messages left on his mobile phone to colleagues at his law firm. ‘Curtis, where are you?’ asked a voice with a Russian accent. ‘We are here. We are behind you. We follow you.’ At the inquest his uncle, Eric Jenkins, testified that his nephew had repeated the same words of warning to him.

The frequent threats convinced some of Curtis’s colleagues and relations that he was murdered. ‘Definitely’, one former employee of his law firm claimed. ‘It was done by remote control. They knew about his flight plans in advance because they were tapping his phones.’ Dennis Radford, the father of the pilot, told the subsequent inquest that he did not think that the Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) had properly investigated the possibility of foul play. ‘The lack of security at Bournemouth Airport is such that, had anybody wished to sabotage the aircraft, they would have unchallenged and unrestricted access for that purpose,’ he said.

Witnesses say that they heard an unexplained and incredibly loud bang just before the crash. ‘I heard a kind of thump noise and the dog started barking, so I came outside and I heard another couple of bangs. It made a particularly harsh noise, as if the engine was malfunctioning,’ Jack Malt, who lives near the crash site, testified at the inquest. ‘There was a period of silence in the moments before the explosion so I guess the engines must have cut out,’ said Sarah Price, who lives 300 yards from the site of the crash. She also heard a massive bang just before the explosion. And Gavin Foxwell, another local resident, told the inquest that the helicopter made ‘a stuttering, unusual sound, as if it was struggling to stay aloft’.

The death of Stephen Curtis remains a mystery to this day. However, no credible evidence of sabotage or murder has ever been discovered. The investigation by the AAIB concluded:

The possibilities of unauthorised interference were considered. An improvised explosive device could have been positioned in the cabin or the baggage hold. All cabin doors at the undamaged skin of the baggage door were, however, recovered from the accident site. No evidence of damage other than consistent with ground impact was found on any of them. In particular no high velocity particle impacts were noted in any of these door components.

At the inquest Paul Hannant, the Senior Inspector of the AAIB, said, ‘If you are going to bring an aircraft like this down, you have either got to destroy the main rotor system or interfere with the main gearbox. The only other real way is to interfere with the controls. If you disconnect the controls, that would be immediately apparent to the pilot…Any attempt to use a corrosive device or a remote control device would also have been apparent to Captain Radford.’

Ultimately, deteriorating weather conditions and pilot inexperience were blamed for the crash. According to the AAIB inspector, ‘The most likely cause of the accident was that Captain Radford became disorientated during the final stages of the approach to Bournemouth Airport.’ Yet, while the weather on the fateful night of 3 March 2004 was poor - light drizzle, broken cloud, and overcast sky - flying conditions were not especially hazardous. As his father Dennis later claimed, ‘Max had flown many, many times in considerably worse conditions than that. And if he became disorientated, why was he on the radio describing the runway and talking to the control tower twenty-nine seconds before the crash?’

At the inquest assessments of Radford’s experience and competence were mixed. He had been a pilot since 1993, had recorded 3,500 flying hours, and had been flying Curtis regularly. During his operational training for flying the new, upgraded Agusta A109E, Radford consulted two flight instructors. ‘I felt his confidence exceeded his competence,’ testified Alan Davis, but Richard Poppy concluded that Radford was ‘competent’ to fly the Agusta A109E. While the AAIB found that he had not used instrument flying since 2000, they accepted that he was very familiar with the route and had ‘already achieved seventy-eight hours’ over the previous two months.

The inquest jury at Bournemouth Town Hall took just over one hour to reach a verdict of ‘accidental death’. Despite the verdict, however, some close relations remain sceptical to this day. They point out that Radford was a responsible, cautious pilot who had refused to fly Curtis in the past when the weather was poor, notably for a New Year’s Eve party at Pennsylvania Castle.

Curtis’s former security advisers remain suspicious, too. Nigel Brown is adamant that it was an assassination and is highly critical of the police. ‘What I cannot understand is why there has never been a proper murder investigation’, he has said. ‘There was a just cause of suspicion because Stephen had received death threats, there was a motive because of what he knew, and there were suspicious circumstances. But the police did not interview me or my colleagues or Stephen’s clients or his employees. Usually, the police would interview the last person to speak to him and I was that person. We may not know for sure what happened to Stephen but I think there could have been a more thorough inquiry.’

While Curtis’s wife Sarah has never believed that her husband was murdered, she has reflected on why it was a Russian businessman who first informed her about the death of her husband. ‘I am sorry that Stephen is dead,’ he told her. The police did not telephone until an hour later to say that ‘there has been an accident’.

It is a measure of the accuracy of the premonitions Curtis had about a premature death that he left detailed instructions for his funeral. This was partly influenced by his superstitious, almost fatalistic nature. He believed in ghosts and in the afterlife and always thought that he would die young. ‘I will never make old bones’, he once said, well before he met the Russians.

But Curtis had also been diagnosed with leukemia and a rare blood disease. This manifested itself in bizarre ways. During a sailing trip he once hit his head heavily on the boom of the boat and a friend was stunned to see his bloody flesh wound apparently heal before his very eyes. Curtis needed regular blood transfusions to stabilize him and took Warfarin to thin his blood and prevent clotting. He also wore surgical stockings to inhibit deep-vein thrombosis. After two operations at a private clinic, he was told that he could no longer travel by airplane because this would worsen his condition. But he could fly by helicopter, which was why, just three months before his death, he upgraded to the Agusta A109E.

Typical of his flamboyant and irreverent personality, he requested that his funeral should not be a mournful event but a ‘celebration of his life’ and that mourners were ‘not obliged to wear traditional black’. On Wednesday, 7 April 2004 some 350 relations, friends, and business associates gathered inside All Saints Church in Easton on the Isle of Portland near the Curtis family home at Pennsylvania Castle. Such was the lawyer’s popularity that a further 100 stood outside and loudspeakers were installed to broadcast the proceedings. At 1.50 p.m. a glass carriage bearing Curtis’s coffin arrived, drawn by two blackplumed horses and adorned with flowers that spelt the word ‘Daddy’. The carriage was followed by a Rolls-Royce Phantom, carrying his widow Sarah and his daughter Louise, and two Bentleys and a Ferrari, ferrying other relations and close friends.

Preceded by a Scottish piper who played the ‘Skye Boat Song’, the coffin was carried by six bearers into the church, followed by a tearful Sarah and Louise, both wearing pink coats and dresses. As they slowly walked down the aisle, Sarah noticed the intense, brooding figure of Boris Berezovsky, dressed in black, in the congregation with his girlfriend, two bodyguards, and a Russian entourage. Most of Curtis’s clients attended. Notable absentees were representatives of his clients IKEA, which did not want to be associated with his controversial Russian clients, as well as most Yukos executives. Indeed, the only Yukos executive to attend was Vasily Alexanyan, a close friend of Curtis and the oil company’s former legal director. Alexanyan was furious that his colleagues had boycotted the funeral despite the risky operations Curtis had conducted for their company.

At 2.00 p.m. the service began with traditional hymns, followed by a piano solo by Louise. It was evident that Curtis was well loved. One speaker described him as epitomizing a line from Rudyard Kipling’s poem If, which reads: ‘If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue/or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch’. His closest friend, Rod Davidson, told the congregation, ‘In business he was in a league of his own. He would start off with an earthquake, build it up to a crescendo and [was] always setting his sights beyond the stars…He was the most generous of men and I think of him now at the pearly gates giving St Peter a red Ferrari and providing Playstations for the cherubs.’