Hell hath no fury like an oligarch scorned. Boris Berezovsky (aka Borya) is hopping mad and he isn’t going to take it any more. Mind you, he was never anybody’s idea of a doormat. And you can kind of see his point. Here is a man who has been at the centre of political and economic power in the former Soviet Union. A man who performed sterling service for Russia’s emerging political class – underwriting the 1996 re-election of Boris Yeltsin when he was extremely unpopular. He then helped convince the tipsy Yeltsin to resign in 2001 and helped create a national political figure out of an obscure securicrat of KGB-vintage named Vladimir Putin. With the support of most of Russia’s new oligarchs and a campaign against all opponents spearheaded by the Berezovsky-controlled ORT TV network, Putin carried Russia by storm – if you ignore the rumours of vote-rigging, that is.

Now the same Putin has turned on him and is seeking his extradition from London on charges relating to fraud and tax evasion. Of all the ingrates! The allegations are that Berezovsky cheated the Samara region while he was head of the Logovaz car empire in the early 1990s. There is a parallel investigation into dealings that stripped Aeroflot of $40 million when Berezovsky was a big player there. It’s got Russia’s richest man pretty steamed. Berezovsky left the courtroom after the Russian extradition hearings wearing a rubber mask of Vladimir Putin. Using something called The Foundation for Civil Liberties in New York, he has launched a $410,000 PR campaign, including expensive ads in the New York Times and the Financial Times (both on 23 September 2003), to criticize the Putin regime’s civil-rights record. He is supporting a range of civil-society organizations and has recruited a number of former dissidents to the cause. He has even underwritten a film charging the Russian security apparatus with involvement in apartment-building explosions in Moscow that were blamed on Chechen terrorists. The explosions killed dozens of ordinary Russians and were among the factors that provoked the second war in Chechnya.

So should we welcome Borya into the ranks of socially concerned capitalists like Ted Turner and George Soros? A little caution might be a good idea. Berezovsky is after all the epitome of the Russian oligarch complete with bodyguards, armoured vehicles and a pretty sordid history. He was a key inside player, some say ‘the banker’, to the Yeltsin ‘family’ that used the Kremlin to amass huge personal fortunes in the old President’s last days. Earlier Berezovsky raised funds from the luxury automobile market to start a manufacturing firm AVVA (the all-Russian Automobile Alliance) to produce a ‘people’s car’ that somehow never rolled off the assembly line. Berezovsky moved on to take holdings in everything from television and publishing to aluminium. Possibly his biggest score was in setting up the Russian oil company Sibneft.

He typifies the kind of Russian financial oligarch made rich by privatization at knockdown prices but little engaged in actual production. Hit-and-run bankruptcies became a kind of Berezovsky speciality. Business Week (24 July 2000) refers to him as ‘a cash-flow manager who diverts funds from one pet operation to another’. It’s safe to say that a good deal of this cash flow has been into safer personal investments in the West.

You can’t do this kind of business without making a few enemies. Berezovsky is candid on the point: ‘Most people in Russia don’t like me, but I don’t care what they think.’ Some people didn’t like him enough to blow up his Mercedes in 1994. Later he lost the immunity he had gained by engineering his own election to the Duma. The writing was clearly on the wall and Berezovsky went into self-exile in the West.

But there is an even murkier side to the story. The year was 1999. Berezovsky had extensive contacts with Chechen rebels, negotiating several hostage releases. Seemingly out of nowhere, Chechen rebel commanders invaded neighbouring Dagestan. This shut off Caspian oil supplies from the south, vastly increasing the value of the Siberian holdings of Berezovsky and a number of other oligarchs. It also moved the region from a delicate peace to almost inevitable conflict. This suited a number of interests, including a wildly unpopular Russian political class that quickly wrapped themselves in the flag.

Then there were the ‘obstacles’ to Berezovsky’s ambitions who wound up dead. These included the journalist Vladislav Listev, who was trying to lead an ethical revolution at ORT TV, and more recently the politician Sergei Yushenkov, who had engineered Berezovsky’s expulsion from the opposition political party Liberal Russia. No connection to Berezovsky was proved. Forbes magazine was forced publicly to retract after calling Berezovsky a Mafia boss and ‘Godfather of the Kremlin’ (30 December 1996).

So it was with their famous ‘clear conscience’ that New Labour granted asylum in Britain to Boris Berezovsky. He was, after all a man of substance worth a reported two billion dollars. While Berezovsky is undoubtedly grateful, he is likely to want to run his campaign for ‘democracy’ and ‘open society’ in his former homeland from his beautiful villa at Cap d’Antibes on the French Riviera. The food’s better and that damp London climate can be the death of you.