A Very Expensive Poison (23 page)

Some interpreted the circumstances of his death as a coded message from the Kremlin. Berezovsky had disagreed with Putin’s war in Chechnya. In 1999, Putin said of the Chechen rebels: ‘If we catch them on the toilet, we will wipe them out in the outhouse.’ Did Berezovsky’s death in a bathroom, not far from the loo, hark back to Putin’s remark? Others believed Berezovsky may have been helped to commit suicide. They pointed to inconsistencies at the scene: what was Berezovsky’s body doing on the floor?

Meanwhile, Yuri Felshtinsky said he’d spoken to Berezovsky on the phone a few months before his death. ‘He didn’t appear to be suicidal. He had been looking for private schools in the US for his daughter. Boris understood that the Kremlin aimed to destroy him,’ Felshtinsky said.

The late French writer Gérard de Villiers – who specialised in turning real events into lightly fictionalised thrillers – devoted his last novel to Berezovsky. Called
Revenge of the Kremlin
, it postulates that Berezovsky was indeed murdered. A five-man squad neutralises the estate’s security system, goes into the house, and immobilises Berezovsky before he can reach for his gun. They inject him with an undetectable poison that renders him unconscious, tie his prone body to the shower rail and escape.

These suspicions, of course, proved nothing. But they spoke volumes about the expectations of Kremlin behaviour. After Litvinenko’s murder, the idea that the Russian government might assassinate a well-known political critic living in exile, in a country with which Russia was not at war, was all too believable.

In 2007, Scotland Yard had intercepted yet another plot to kill him. The alleged assassin was a Paris-based Chechen, Ruslan Atlangeriev. Police advised Berezovsky to leave the country for a few days; he flew to Israel. Atlangeriev was caught trying to break into Berezovsky’s Mayfair office. He was deported back to Russia, where he disappeared.

There was also the strange matter of the T-shirt.

In July 2010, Berezovsky met with a business associate from his Moscow days, Rafael Filinov, in London. Filinov also knew Andrei Lugovoi. Filinov delivered a present from Lugovoi for Berezovksy – a black custom-made T-shirt printed on the front and back.

The T-shirt didn’t win any prizes for subtlety. On the front were the words ‘Polonium-210, CSKA, London, Hamburg, to be continued’, around a red star logo of the CSKA football team. On the back: ‘CSKA Moscow, nuclear death is knocking your door’.

Was this a sick joke? Or a warning that Berezovsky was next? The oligarch’s assistant, Michael Cotlick, said Berezovsky held the T-shirt up and exclaimed: ‘Look what Lugovoi has sent me.’ They came to the conclusion that it wasn’t a threat, though what it portended was unclear. Cotlick gave the T-shirt to Scotland Yard. It joined the mountain of evidence against Lugovoi.

The Kremlin had put enormous pressure on Berezovsky over a period of many years – though his courtroom defeat was surely self-inflicted. In Moscow, Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s press spokesman, claimed that Berezovsky had written a letter to Russia’s president shortly before his death requesting forgiveness. Berezovsky begged to come home to Russia, Peskov said. The letter was never published.

Meanwhile, a Russian reporter from
Forbes
claimed to have interviewed Berezovsky in London’s Four Seasons Hotel the evening before his death. Berezovsky allegedly told the reporter, Ilya Zhegulev, he yearned for Moscow and had ‘over-estimated’ the west. Berezovsky drank a cup of tea with honey.

These Moscow-inspired media reports looked and sounded self-serving. Deconstructed, they amounted to a Kremlin morality tale: if you oppose legitimate Russian power, you end up in exile, broke, friendless and ultimately dead. Nikolai Kovalyov, the former head of the FSB, probably best summed up the Kremlin’s real feelings towards the late oligarch. Kovalyov told Russian TV that Berezovsky had got what he and other traitors deserved – an unpleasant end.

Berezovsky’s funeral took place in May 2013. Six weeks had passed since his death. Around thirty mourners – family, friends and lawyers – attended. There was tight security. The ceremony was in Brookwood Cemetery near Woking in Surrey. The service took place in a small brick chapel, overlooked by suitably Russian pines and silver birches, and under a dull, pearl-grey sky.

One guest arrived in a Bentley. There were several Mercedes. I travelled by rail, reporting on the event for the
Guardian
. Others dressed in black and bearing white lilies came on the same modest suburban train to Brook-wood Station. Zakayev turned up with his son Shamil; we chatted briefly. Berezovsky’s daughter Yelizaveta brought flowers. It was a strikingly understated send-off for a man who had lived and blazed in the public eye, in Russia and the UK.

‘He was a friend. I miss him. I’m very grateful to Boris. Through him I felt the touch of history,’ Goldfarb said. For better or worse, he added, Berezovsky had played a major role in the 1990s: advising Yeltsin, bringing peace
to Chechnya and promoting Putin – his biggest error. One of the mourners was Rabinowitz, his QC. What did he make of Berezovsky? Rabinowitz, walking along a path lined with rhododendrons, and in meditative mood, told me: ‘He was very Russian, like something from the pages of a Dostoyevsky novel.’

In March 2014, an inquest opened into Berezovsky’s death. The two-day hearing in Windsor heard evidence that confirmed suicide. Dr Simon Poole, a forensic scientist, said that microscopic tests of the tissues on Berezovsky’s neck revealed no sign of any restraint or defence injuries. Toxicology tests didn’t turn up any poisons. Another scientist, Dr Raymond Fysh, said he saw no evidence that Berezovsky had been strangled.

A German forensic pathologist, Professor Bernd Brinkmann, disagreed. Brinkmann didn’t examine Berezovsky’s corpse but he did review autopsy photographs. He concluded that the businessman didn’t kill himself. His report, commissioned by Berezovsky’s family, said that a number of assailants may have murdered Berezovsky, suspending him by his scarf from the shower rail. ‘The strangulation mark is completely different from the strangulation mark in hanging,’ Brinkmann said. An assailant could have throttled him in a bedroom, he posited.

Brinkmann was an interesting witness. It was Brinkmann who had proved that the Italian banker Roberto Calvi – found hanging from Blackfriars Bridge in 1982 – had been murdered. Calvi’s family had never believed the official version of suicide; Brinkmann’s
report two decades later led police to reopen the case as a murder inquiry. The killers appeared to be the Sicilian mafia. In 2005, five Italians were tried for Calvi’s murder but acquitted.

This time, however, the coroner Peter Bedford was sceptical of Brinkmann’s conclusions. Bedford said it was unlikely anyone could have attacked Berezovsky ‘without any reaction’ from him. Rather, Bedford said that there was convincing evidence that Berezovsky – depressed, and under financial pressure – was capable of suicide. However, Bedford acknowledged that Brinkmann was an eminent witness. He entered an open verdict.

This meant the cause of death was impossible to determine. It could be either murder or suicide. Thames Valley Police were privately irritated with the verdict and Brinkmann’s evidence.

The family still believe Berezovsky was murdered. Yelizaveta Berezovskaya, daughter by his first marriage, pointed a finger at the Russian government. She told the inquest a number of people would be interested in having him killed. The motive, she suggested, was obvious: for more than a decade Berezovsky had warned that Putin wasn’t merely a danger to Russia but was capable of menacing other countries too.

Recent events had proved him right. ‘I don’t think they liked what my father was saying. He was saying that Putin was a danger to the whole world. And you can see that now,’ she said.

It was hard to disagree with that. Days earlier, Putin had annexed a large chunk of someone else’s territory.

Putin seemed unstoppable. But just a few months before Berezovsky’s demise, another mysterious death of a Russian émigré on British soil was to raise still further questions that were to resonate at the very top of international politics.

The names sound quintessentially English – Silverwood, Horsley, Bassett Lodge, Hawthorn Mill. Each refers to a mansion on the private St George’s Hill estate in Weybridge. The houses here are large – think three-storey mock-Tudor mansions with dormer windows, sweeping driveways and triple garages. Their owners are rich people. Naturally enough, they value their privacy. Signs suggest that outsiders and those who are not members of the local golf club can piss off. Guardhouses limit access at the entrances. Branded estate vehicles buzz along the woody drives.

St George’s is Britain’s bucolic answer to Beverly Hills. Celebrities like this green corner of Surrey, immediately south-west of London. John Lennon, Ringo Starr, Elton John and Tom Jones have all lived here. Others keep a low profile for different reasons. There are hedge fund
managers, City bankers, a Nigerian computer tycoon. Their personal accounts and investments – all legal and declared, of course – amount to millions. Contractors are used to installing bulletproof glass and panic rooms for some of the more particular residents.

Granville Road is a typical St George’s address. At its entrance is a white barred gate. A notice in front of a large rhododendron says: ‘Restricted access’. Fifteen-foot-high hedges of laurel and copper beech shield the houses and their enormous gardens from view. CCTV cameras are everywhere. As one police officer told the
Observer
newspaper: ‘Even the security has security.’ If you want to disappear this is a good spot, a wooded refugium of silver birch and pine.

On 10 November 2012, one St George’s resident was returning from an early-evening jog. It was 5.15 p.m. The runner, dressed in a tracksuit, turned into Granville Road. Ahead of him was his home in exile, the Coach House, which he shared with his wife Tatiana and their two children. The property was at the end of a turning circle. The house was imposing – six bedrooms, £12,500 a month rent, a Porsche parked outside. In the garden was a kids’ trampoline.

Fifty metres from his front door, the jogger collapsed. He didn’t get up. He lay face down on the ground.

Police arriving at the scene jotted down a few details. The man’s name was Alexander Perepilichnyy. He was a Russian citizen and forty-four years old. He had previously been in excellent health. Like Litvinenko,
Perepilichnyy had fled to the UK from Moscow after a dispute with some powerful people there. Since 2010, he had been living anonymously and quietly with his family in St George’s, avoiding trouble. Latterly, he’d been receiving some worrying messages from Russia.

Perepilichnyy lay motionless under a white sheet. A single lamp-post illuminated the darkness. Liam Walsh, a local chef, said that when he arrived at the scene the Russian wasn’t breathing. ‘We had to get him on his back and start doing CPR. He was probably dead for a while,’ Walsh told Reuters. There was zero paramedics could do. No obvious cause of death. No obvious sign of foul play either. Unexplained, then.

It would take more than two years before the likely murder weapon was discovered, and then not by men in uniform. The weapon was a rare and deadly toxin. It had been on a journey as improbable as that taken by the polonium from a closed nuclear city in the Urals to the streets of Mayfair. Whoever was responsible had shown a high degree of cunning. Was this the FSB? The toxin came from a plant. A plant that grows on the hillsides of China.

If he’d been born a couple of decades earlier, Perepilichnyy might have been a professor. Maybe even a member of the Soviet Union’s prestigious academy of sciences. He was a talented physicist and maths whizz. Born in Western Ukraine, he moved to Moscow in the 1980s to study at the Physical and Technological University in the faculty of molecular and biological physics.
In his student days Perepilichnyy was a vertical, skinny figure, with gangling legs, jet-black hair and pale skin. He preferred black clothes. His expression was somewhat absent, as if he was thinking about something. He was an introvert, serious and deadpan, even when making a joke. Friends called him Stanek.

According to one friend, Yuri Panchul, Perepilichnyy dreamed of moving to the US. In 1989, he wanted to apply to an American university to do a post-grad in biochemistry or biophysics. Leaving the USSR was no longer a problem but he lacked cash. So Perepilichnyy began trading in computers. Gorbachev had allowed private ventures for the first time. Perepilichnyy began selling computers to government organisations, as well as fax machines, which the Soviet Union had effectively prohibited.

In seven months, between mid-autumn 1989 and spring 1990, Perepilichnyy earned a couple of thousand dollars, and then bigger sums. ‘His perspective on life changed. Originally he was a quiet student who had good grades. He discovered this intense drive for earning money,’ Panchul said. Perepilichnyy bought himself a black Mercedes. He parked it several blocks from his faculty so as not to embarrass his badly off lecturers. He was now an intermediary in the new private economy.

Perepilichnyy’s teachers thought him a capable student and invited him to do a PhD. He declined and in 1991 began trading on the country’s first commodity exchanges. ‘He became a private investor,’ Panchul said. ‘He started to move in circles frequented by all sorts of sharks.’ Many
of his new contacts were busy acquiring fortunes through dodgy methods. Perepilichnyy, however, worked openly. ‘He didn’t have a criminal mentality,’ Panchul added. ‘He had some feeling of decency, some rules. He just happened to be in a place where these new rules were not mature.’

By the mid-nineties, Perepilichnyy was a successful investment fund manger. The promising student who played cards and read sci-fi novels now looked after the money of some extremely well-connected Muscovites, who believed him to be a financial genius. They included Olga Stepanova, a top Moscow tax official, and her husband Vladlen. Panchul last spoke to Perepilichnyy in the early noughties. He was doing well and had acquired a flat in London. He was still dealing with ‘strange people’ and ‘taking risks’ but hadn’t lost his ‘moral standards’, Panchul said.

In 2007, Stepanova, and others in a circle featuring interior ministry officials, suddenly acquired very large sums of money. Perepilichnyy sprinkled some of it through accounts he managed on their behalf in Cyprus and Switzerland.

From where had this windfall come?

In 2005, Bill Browder, a US-born financier, was unexpectedly deported from Russia. Browder was the CEO of Hermitage Capital, an asset management company and a major investor in Russia. Browder had been a fan of Putin’s in the early years, seeing him as an ally in the fight against oligarchic malfeasance. Like many others, Browder found the new president inscrutable. He had failed to appreciate that Putin wasn’t interested
in cleaning up corruption. Rather his aim was to redistribute the state’s resources among his KGB friends.

The Kremlin-approved attack on Browder left Hermitage vulnerable. In 2007, a group of officials, led by a convicted fraudster, Dmitry Klyuyev, seized three Hermitage firms. They claimed the firms had lost $1 billion and were therefore entitled to a tax refund from the state. On Christmas Eve, a $230 million transfer was secretly approved in a matter of hours – by Perepilichnyy’s client Olga Stepanova, the head of Moscow tax office No. 28. The stolen funds were then laundered though different countries using shell companies.

The criminals made only one mistake: they underestimated Browder. Browder is driven, obsessional and unrelenting. I got to know him after my forced departure from Russia. His personal story – told in a page-turning memoir,
Red Notice
– is interesting, too. The grandson of Earl Browder, the head of the US Communist Party in the 1930s, Browder had rebelled against his brainy left-wing family and become a capitalist, venturing into Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet bloc.

Stuck in London, he hired a team to investigate back in Russia. It included an idealistic young anti-corruption lawyer called Sergei Magnitsky. In 2008, Magnitsky found out where the stolen money had gone. He filed a complaint to Russian prosecutors. The same officials who had carried out the fraud, including an investigator at the interior ministry, Major Pavel Karpov, had Magnitsky arrested. He was tossed into a freezing cell and refused medical treatment.

Magnitsky suffered from pancreatitis and gallstones, and spent months in pain. The officials wouldn’t allow his family to visit. This state-sanctioned torture was meant to make him withdraw his testimony. He didn’t. Threats were sent to Hermitage in London; one of Browder’s colleagues received a text, quoting from
The Godfather Part II,
which said: ‘History has taught us that anybody can be killed.’

In Moscow, Magnitsky’s condition grew critical. In November 2009, guards put him in an isolation cell. There, they beat him to death. He was thirty-seven, married, the father of two small boys, and a representative of Russia’s decent middle class. He had believed that the law would protect him, that Russia had said farewell to its Soviet ghosts. It was a tragic misjudgement. At least three other people who testified against the fraud in Russia died in unclear circumstances.

Browder began a global campaign to bring Magnitsky’s killers to justice. Since they occupied mid-ranking positions in the interior ministry and FSB there was no prospect of this happening inside Russia’s own legal system.

Perepilichnyy, meanwhile, was facing big problems of his own. His job, it appears, had been to offer semilegal financial services to a range of clients, including corrupt ones.

During the 2008–9 financial crash he lost much of his clients’ funds. They accused him of robbing them and demanded he repay their market losses. One of them was said to be Dmitry Kovtun, Litvinenko’s killler. Kovtun and Perepilichnyy may have had business together.
More probably, though, Perepilchnyy’s enemies invoked Kovtun’s name in order to frighten him.

Perepilichnyy fled Russia and moved with his family to Surrey. In July 2010, he sent an anonymous email to Hermitage under a false Spanish name, Alejandro Sanches.

The email began:

Perepilichnyy signed off as ‘Sergei’. He said he couldn’t give his real name ‘as my relatives live in Russia’.

His information was astonishing – details of an alleged money-laundering ring involving the Russian mafia and state. It included the identities of those who had pulled off the fraud, print-outs from the Stepanovs’ secret bank account with Credit Suisse, and an explanation as to where the money had gone – on Range Rovers, Moscow real estate and tacky properties in Dubai.

One mansion bought by the Stepanovs was on Palm Jumeirah, the world’s largest man-made island, reclaimed from Dubai’s coast. The island forms the shape of a palm tree as viewed from the air: some residents
lived on its ‘trunk’, others on ‘fronds’. The Stepanovs’ villa, number 48, was on Frond F – out of the way by Palm standards, and at the end of a sun-bleached and desolate cul de sac. There are few shops and amenities here. Barriers, cones and a Filipino security guard keep out the uninvited.

At first, Hermitage was suspicious of this unknown Russian. Jamison Firestone, a US lawyer and ally of Browder’s who had hired Magnitsky and knew him well, sent emails back. There was no immediate answer. In August, however, ‘Alejandro’ gave further details. And offered to meet in London.

The rendezvous took place in the upscale surroundings of the Westbury in Mayfair. The five-star hotel is close to Grosvenor Street and the scene of Litvinenko’s twin poisonings. Firestone was waiting in the Polo Bar. Security guards had taken up positions undercover; they had already waved a Geiger counter up and down. Perepilichnyy sauntered in – now a chunky, somewhat dowdy figure, wearing a tracksuit and no tie. He was distinctly underdressed for his posh surroundings and not quite the ‘minigarch’, or minor oligarch, they’d expected.

According to Jamison, Perepilichnyy began by saying in Russian: ‘It’s really terrible what happened to your colleague. I admire your work.’

Gradually it became clear that Perepilchnyy was genuine, and someone from the inside. Someone with a grudge. Stepanov had used his wife’s tax connections to destroy Perepilichnyy’s business empire – and now
Perepilichnyy was retaliating. ‘This was a move in a war to get the heat off, to get them [the Stepanovs] to back down,’ Jamison said. ‘It was a business dispute between partners. Perepilichnyy wanted to rip the legs from under them.’

There were further meetings in the same bar in London, over green tea and biscuits. According to Ivan Cherkasov, a Russian lawyer working for Browder, who fled Russia, Perepilichnyy was uninterested in his surroundings. ‘He was someone who existed in a world of maths and logic,’ he said.

Perepilichnyy turned over more documents. They included statements showing payments of several million euros to Stepanov’s private Credit Suisse bank account. The money came from a Cyprus-based company, Arivust Holdings, also belonging to Stepanov. One source, who met Perepilichnyy several times, said: ‘He was a nice chap. He was bright. He seemed rational.’

Hermitage gave this material to the Swiss attorney general. Some sources say Perepilichnyy ignored advice from his brother-in-law in Moscow to drop his complaint. Swiss prosecutors then froze Stepanov’s account, containing €8 million. Other ‘investors’ using the same dubious schemes also saw their funds seized.