International Herald Tribune
Russia forces tycoon to sell his holdings
By Andrew E. Kramer The New York Times
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 17, 2006
 
MOSCOW Boris Berezovsky, the self-exiled Russian oligarch, said Friday that he would sell all his remaining business interests in Russia and elsewhere to a partner because of unremitting pressure from the Kremlin.

Berezovsky, once Russia's richest man, is wanted by the Russian authorities for fraud but was granted political asylum in Britain.

He said pressure from the government of President Vladimir Putin had become too great to operate his businesses in Russia and elsewhere in Europe.

His partner, a citizen of Georgia, is also wanted by Russia for allegedly attempting a prison break to free another associate five years ago.

Thus it was unclear whether the announced sale would alleviate what Berezovsky said in an interview were politically motivated attacks on his companies.

"This is a decision based exclusively on Putin's pressure on any business that does not agree to accept" Putin's "authoritarian" government, Berezovsky said Friday in a telephone interview from London.

"Some of my accounts are frozen, in Switzerland, initiated by Russia prosecutors," he said. "Many banks have refused to take my absolutely transparent money because they have business in Russia" and fear reprisals from the Kremlin.

Berezovsky, a top Soviet mathematician, figured out after the fall of communism how to skim the profits from Russia's largest carmaker, which was then state-owned.

He then parlayed business success into political influence in the 1990s, wielding great power under President Boris Yeltsin.

He owned stakes in Aeroflot airlines, the Sibneft oil company, Rusal aluminum and ORT, the most watched television channel.

In politics, he helped propel Putin to the presidency in 2000, through his ties to the Yeltsin government and his influence on ORT's editorial line.

After his election, Putin began a campaign of tax claims and other pressure against the oligarchs, including Berezovsky.

Last month, in an interview on the Echo of Moscow radio station, Berezovsky called for an armed coup against Putin.

Berezovsky said his partner, Badri Patarkatsishvili, worried about mounting political risk after that interview.

The only known remaining asset of the two in Russia is the Kommersant Publishing House, owner of a respected business newspaper of the same name and current affairs and hobby magazines.

Elsewhere, they own an investment fund with about $1 billion in assets, according to a report by the Vedomosti newspaper, which first reported Berezovsky's plans to divest in its Friday edition.

"My friend, Badri is not in politics," Berezovsky said. "He is different from me. He said, 'Boris, he will destroy our business if you do not sell.' So I will sell."

The two met in Israel last week and agreed to audit their common holdings and close the buyout within months, said Berezovsky, who works in a secure office in London accessible only through a thumb-print reader and who is often accompanied by two private bodyguards.

He was vague about the current value of his businesses. "I don't have any idea. It's billions," he said.

The announced sale came as little more than a footnote to Berezovsky's history of swashbuckling capitalism in the decade after the fall of communism, as his influence in Moscow had already waned, analysts said.

"He was a big-time political operator, behind many political developments, not least Yeltsin's re-election in 1996, " Masha Lipman, a researcher at the Moscow office of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said in a telephone interview.

He also helped defeat a competing faction led by Moscow's mayor, Yuri Luzkhov, in the struggle for succession in 1999.

"Since then, he was increasingly in trouble with Putin's government. And after he was pushed out of the country, his influence has dwindled. And now it's nothing," she said.

"As much as one can predict in today's Russia, he will not make a comeback," she said.

Others said that Berezovsky rarely operates transparently, and they questioned the motives for announcing the sale of all his business assets.

Indeed, in 1999, Berezovsky purchased the Kommersant publishing house in a non-transparent manner, through a front company, American Capital (USA), which is registered in the British Virgin Islands.

"Berezovsky is never straightforward when it comes to business," Yevgenia Albats, an author and authority on Russian politics, said in an interview. "He's a player."

Berezovsky is accused in Russia of embezzling money from Aeroflot and from the Logovaz car dealership and of financing guerrillas in Chechnya. He denies wrongdoing.

Patarkatsishvili is wanted for allegedly trying to orchestrate the escape in 2001 of Nikolai Glushkov, a former vice president of Aeroflot.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/02/17/business/tycoon.php