From Russia with Blood

xv

London, Surrey, and Tbilisi—November 2007

Badri Patarkatsishvili had never really settled into British life. He spent swaths of his year in Surrey to be close to Berezovsky, and though he could hardly have established himself in a grander setting than the magnificent Downside Manor, there was still something about Britain that made him feel small. It didn’t help that he had never mastered the language, so he couldn’t enjoy the culture in the same way Berezovsky did, and he had no way of communicating directly with their army of British lawyers, financiers, and fixers. But there was also the general sense that no one quite understood who he was here. Patarkatsishvili had never craved the limelight, and he was happy to let Berezovsky take center stage, but he did like to be treated with the basic reverence he felt a multibillionaire was due.

Things could not have been more different back in Georgia. The mustachioed oligarch was the country’s richest man by lightyears, and his personal fortune dwarfed the entire government budget of the tiny poverty-stricken state so vastly that he could afford to treat Tbilisi as his own personal toy town. He’d snapped up the city’s soccer club, its basketball team, its theme park, and its circus. He built a spanking new shopping mall in the city center as well as a massive holiday resort on the Black Sea, and he established a national TV and radio network called Imedi—meaning “hope” in Georgian.

If his people ran into trouble, he appeared like a fairy godfather in a fur hat and made their difficulties disappear with a wave of his checkbook. Twice, when the government defaulted on its energy payments, he’d stepped in to settle Tbilisi’s entire gas and electricity bill himself. He funded charitable projects and schools—even a cash-strapped monastery. And when the Georgian National Olympic Committee ran out of money, in 2004, he took over as chair and paid for its athletes to compete in the Athens games out of his own purse.

Patarkatsishvili was a businessman in his bones, and he saw Berezovsky’s war with the Kremlin as a threat to their investments in the West, so he did his best to steer clear of political drama and stay focused on managing their money. But there was one major exception. As equable as he was about most things, his passions ran high when it came to his homeland, and he liked being his country’s Mr. Big. Perhaps that was why, when Georgia erupted with mass protests against its corrupt post-Soviet government in 2003, he’d broken his vow of political abstinence to help fund the opposition.

The unrest culminated in the Rose Revolution, which toppled the regime and brought the US-backed Mikheil Saakashvili to power on a platform of EU and NATO accession. It had started the wave of “color revolutions” that swept the former Soviet states, enraging Putin and cementing Patarkatsishvili’s status as an enemy of the Kremlin. But his relations with Saakashvili soon turned sour. The president introduced a raft of economic reforms that threatened Patarkatsishvili’s near monopoly on the country’s private sector, and the oligarch retaliated by using his TV and radio stations to attack the new administration.

It didn’t take long for the new government to become mired in its own allegations of corruption and human rights abuses, and by 2006 a new protest movement began mushrooming up across the country. By then, Patarkatsishvili had grown tired of struggling to do business amid a blizzard of arrest warrants and freeze orders as Moscow prosecutors put pressure on foreign banks and governments to clamp down on the money he and Berezovsky had expropriated. He was looking for a way to mend fences with the Kremlin—and that was when he hit upon his big idea.

Putin needed to be pacified, and it occurred to Patarkatsishvili that Georgia was the one place where their interests now aligned. If he poured enough money into the country’s new protest movement, perhaps he could create a second uprising big enough to topple the US-backed president and undo the outcome of the Rose Revolution. Ridding Georgia of its pro-Western government would be a massive free gift for the Kremlin. Would that be enough to win him a reprieve?

He and Berezovsky had already announced their intention to “divorce” as a partnership—telling friends privately that the arrangement was a sham to protect their joint business interests and place a cordon sanitaire around Berezovsky’s political activities—which meant that Patarkatsishvili could make overtures to the Kremlin with apparent independence. Perhaps he might be able to persuade Putin to ease off his attacks on their fortune in exchange for ousting Saakashvili, while Berezovsky could carry on kicking the Kremlin as he pleased from a respectable distance.

Berezovsky liked that idea, and he came up with his own brain wave. What if Patarkatsishvili toppled Saakashvili and then ran for president himself? If he succeeded, they would have an entire country under their control, right on Russia’s doorstep. To his surprise, his partner didn’t dismiss the idea out of hand, so on a late spring day in 2006, Boris and Badri sat down together with two of their closest advisers and penned a letter to Putin. The message was one of general goodwill, noting a mutual interest in the downfall of Saakashvili, and it was signed by Patarkatsishvili. The Georgian oligarch sent it to the Kremlin—and then he lit the fuse on his campaign to depose the government in Tbilisi.

It took eighteen months for the protest movement to erupt into an uprising. Patarkatsishvili had poured money into ten opposition groups that were mounting an escalating campaign against the Georgian administration, and he stepped up his own attacks on Saakashvili, branding him a “fascist” and using his TV station to raise hell for the regime. In November of 2007, tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets of Tbilisi to call for the removal of Saakashvili.

Riot police fought for five days to disperse the crowd with tear gas and water cannons, hospitalizing more than five hundred protesters, and then they raided Patarkatsishvili’s TV station and took it off the air. Saakashvili declared a fifteen-day state of emergency and accused the Georgian oligarch of spearheading a Russian-backed plot to sow turmoil in Tbilisi, but he moved to quell the unrest by announcing an early election the following January. Prosecutors declared that Patarkatsishvili was wanted for plotting a coup, and the oligarch fled back to Downside Manor. Two days later, on November 10, he announced his intention to run in the presidential election from Britain.

Patarkatsishvili kicked off by pledging $1 billion of his own fortune to turn Georgia into a “shining country.” The money would be spent on raising the minimum wage, boosting pensions, paying the utility bills for most Georgian households for the next eighteen months, and buying up the country’s entire crop of citrus fruit and grapes.

American diplomats stationed in Georgia eyed Patarkatsishvili’s bid with intense suspicion. They knew the Georgian opposition movement was crawling with Russian intelligence agents working to destabilize Saakashvili’s US-backed administration, and they suspected Patarkatsishvili of having a “darker side” than the benevolent bon vivant most of his associates knew. In one confidential cable back to Washington, the US ambassador noted that although the Georgian oligarch had long worked as Berezovsky’s “enforcer,” he remained disturbingly close to some “extremely unsavory figures” in the FSB—including Andrey Lugovoy. “Despite his differences with the government of Russia, Patarkatsishvili is believed to be closely allied with Russian intelligence services,” the cable stated.

It was true that Patarkatsishvili kept active links with people inside FSB. He made no secret of those associations, telling his friends it was best to keep his enemies close, but he never would say what he discussed at his frequent meetings with agents in both London and Tbilisi. The extent to which he was communicating with elements of the Russian state about his activities in Georgia remained a mystery. But the battle for Tbilisi turned ugly fast.

First the former Georgian defense minister came forward to accuse Saakashvili of ordering Patarkatsishvili’s assassination, only to be arrested for corruption two days later. Then Akhmed Zakayev obtained a tape of a Georgian security official ordering a Chechen warlord to eliminate the oligarch—either by murdering him in London or by blowing his private jet out of the sky with a bazooka as it landed in Tbilisi. “Even if he had a hundred people guarding him, well, that’s not a problem,” the official said. “We’ll destroy these guards.”

The warlord had declined the commission, instead taping the conversation and passing the recording to Zakayev, and Lord Bell helped make hay out of the evidence of Saakashvili’s brutality by passing the tape to the London Times. But then Patarkatsishvili’s own campaign was engulfed in scandal when it emerged that he, too, had been contemplating an assassination plot to rig the election.

The oligarch had been approached in late December by a senior Georgian police official who had offered to help him overthrow the government, and the pair met in London to discuss murdering the country’s minister of the interior as part of a complex ploy to trigger mass unrest ahead of the election. The problem was that the police chief had been sent by the Georgian government, and he was wearing a wire. It was a classic sting operation, and Patarkatsishvili was caught in the act. Saakashvili’s people released the tape on Christmas Eve, and it blew the oligarch’s campaign out of the water.

When election day came around, a fortnight later, Patarkatsishvili was trounced, with just 7 percent of the vote, and Saakashvili cruised to reelection. It was a sickening defeat—and the usually equanimous oligarch wasn’t just humiliated, he was also terror-stricken. Now that his plot to oust Saakashvili had backfired, he could never return to Georgia, and he had nothing to barter when it came to dealing with Putin. He was trapped in Britain, and he told his friends his days were numbered. He surrounded himself with 120 bodyguards and lay low at Downside Manor for weeks.

By the following month, he was beginning to rally, and on February 12 he headed into London for a meeting with a lawyer he’d hired to advise him on salvaging his business interests in Georgia. As usual, the oligarch had gone for the very best money could buy, and the man who greeted him at a smart office in the City of London was no less a figure than Lord Goldsmith, Tony Blair’s former attorney general. The meeting turned into quite a festive little gathering: Yuli Dubov and Nikolai Glushkov came to offer their support, along with Berezovsky and Lord Bell. The talks ran on for more than five hours.

Patarkatsishvili seemed energetic and engaged for most of the meeting, but he began to complain toward the end that he was feeling off-color and stepped outside for some fresh air. Afterward, as the exiles stood on the pavement waiting for their cars to be brought around, they joked that it was a pity no one from the FSB was there to witness such an all-star lineup of the Kremlin’s worst enemies.

Patarkatsishvili and Berezovsky retired to Down Street for a private chat before the Georgian was driven back to Downside Manor in his $600,000 Maybach. He ate dinner with his wife, Inna, but soon after the meal he complained again that he was feeling unwell and went upstairs to lie down.

Berezovsky heard the news in the early hours of the morning. Badri Patarkatsishvili was dead. He had been found slumped in the master bedroom at around 11:00 p.m. and could not be resuscitated. The oligarch drove at top speed across Surrey to Downside Manor, but by the time he arrived the mansion had already been cordoned off as officers scanned the whole property for radiation, and police refused to let him in. Lord Bell received a distraught call from Berezovsky around 3:00 a.m.

“They’ve done Badri,” the oligarch sobbed.

Surrey police initially said they were treating the death as suspicious, but then they quickly reversed that position and announced that an autopsy had shown “no indication” that the demise of the rotund fifty-two-year-old was attributable to anything other than natural causes. Like Golubev, Patarkatsishvili appeared to have died naturally of a heart attack—a conclusion Surrey police said they had reached after “very extensive toxicological testing,” which was later supported by the coroner’s verdict.

But British spies were less certain. Sure, Patarkatsishvili was chronically unfit, ate fatty Georgian food, drank heavily, and lit one cigarette from the butt of another from morning until night. There was no disputing that he was a prime candidate for a heart attack. But he had also been the target of several previous assassination plots, and the Russia watchers knew well that his enemies had plenty of ways of making a death look natural.

When the British reached out to the CIA for assistance, the US spies replied by saying they strongly suspected Patarkatsishvili had been poisoned. They could not determine whether the job had been carried out by Georgian or Russian hit men or by organized crime hoodlums, but all their intelligence pointed strongly to another political assassination on British soil. Still, with no forensic evidence to support that conclusion, and no discernible poison in the dead oligarch’s system, the police case remained firmly closed.

Berezovsky was beside himself. “Part of the blame lies with me,” he howled. “I dragged him kicking and screaming into politics.” He had a black-and-white photograph of Patarkatsishvili blown up and hung on the wall of his office at Down Street, and he sat beneath it raising tearful toasts with a one-hundred-year-old Armenian brandy that had been a gift from his dead friend and smoking Parliament 100’s—Badri’s favorite brand of cigarettes. For almost two decades, the men had spoken to each other every single day, and Boris told everyone the only person he had ever loved as much as Badri was his mother.

But in the wake of his death, Patarkatsishvili’s friends and relatives began picking over his affairs—and they uncovered a world of secrets.

The first shocking revelation was that Patarkatsishvili had been living a double life for years. He had married his wife, Inna, in Tbilisi three decades earlier, and the pair had two daughters and three granddaughters—but after his death a second woman came forward to reveal that she, too, had wed the Georgian oligarch—in St. Petersburg in 1997—and that the pair had a fourteen-year-old son. Patarkatsishvili’s second wife and child wanted a share of his riches.

The second shock was that the Georgian oligarch had died without leaving a will or any instructions as to how his massive fortune should be carved up among his survivors. Berezovsky claimed that he and Patarkatsishvili had always split everything down the middle, so he was entitled to half the estate, but the dead man’s family said the two men had severed all relations in their economic divorce, so his partner wasn’t due a penny. The oligarch insisted that the separation had been a sham and everything was still shared—but all that had been agreed on a handshake, and he had nothing to prove it.

For years, Patarkatsishvili had taken care of every practical aspect of Berezovsky’s life, allowing him to continue his political posturing unencumbered by the everyday travails of business. Now that he was gone, chaos descended. As lawyers and advisers struggled to make sense of Patarkatsishvili’s affairs, they uncovered layer upon layer of shell companies wrapped up in obscure trusts and tangled offshore funds. Vast tranches of the oligarch’s supposed fortune were nowhere to be found, and almost nothing was in his name.

Berezovsky was appalled by the mess his partner left behind. He had never paid any attention to how their affairs were structured, where the money was stashed, or how Patarkatsishvili had organized contracts. Both men had come up in the Soviet era, when the ban on private business made it unwise to leave a paper trail, and agreements were held in place by the timeless laws of honor and violence. The suggestion that anything should be put in writing would have been a gross affront to their trust.

But now it was becoming clear that Patarkatsishvili had been putting certain things in writing—just without his partner’s knowledge. He’d been signing vast swaths of what Berezovsky considered to be their shared fortune over to other people, registering the ownership of assets to childhood friends, casual acquaintances, and distant relatives. Hundreds of millions of pounds’ worth of treasures had been placed under the control of a stepcousin of Patarkatsishvili from Tbilisi named Joseph Kay—including Fisher Island, the star-studded Miami islet where Oprah Winfrey and Julia Roberts had homes; the New York branch of Buddha-Bar; and luxury resorts in Spain and Morocco.

Then there was the money stashed in the New World Value Fund, which Boris and Badri had set up to take delivery of their payments from Abramovich, and the multiplicity of other offshore trusts and funds the pair had used to siphon their fortune out of Russia. Much of that had been handled by Ruslan Fomichev—a man Berezovsky had long described as the only person in the world who knew everything about their business affairs—but the oligarch was left flabbergasted when the financier sided with Patarkatsishvili’s family.

Fomichev had been gradually backing away from Berezovsky for several years. He was still doing big business in Russia, and the association with the Kremlin’s number one enemy was nothing but trouble. He had moved out of his office at Down Street around 2005, and Patarkatsishvili’s death provided the opportunity he needed to cut ties for good.

What followed was one of the largest estate battles in legal history, as war broke out between Berezovsky, Kay, and the late tycoon’s two wives over the fortune. And it left the onetime godfather of the oligarchs scrabbling to save himself from financial ruin. Berezovsky sued his partner’s family for his share of the money, and he went after Fomichev, too, lodging a claim over interest payments on a $50 million loan he had made to his financier years before. His great remaining hope was the case against Abramovich, which, if he won, would yield billions of pounds in damages. But with Curtis and Moss long dead, and Fomichev now a foe, Patarkatsishvili had been the only person left to attest to the private deals the pair had done with Abramovich. With his partner’s death Berezovsky had not only lost control of his fortune, he had also lost his star witness.

In the months after his last goodbye to Patarkatsishvili, Berezovsky was left wondering whether his partner had really been the friend he’d seemed. Wasn’t it Badri who had reintroduced Lugovoy into their circle? Hadn’t he kept taking the assassin’s calls long after Litvinenko’s death? His partner had always stayed uncomfortably close to the FSB, and he had been anxious to find a way back in with Putin. Now it turned out that, for years, he had been squirreling their shared fortune out of Berezovsky’s reach.

A few months after Patarkatsishvili’s death, Berezovsky called his assistant into the room and ordered him to take his partner’s portrait down from the wall. He was alone now. But he wasn’t about to stop fighting.