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

With a law degree from Aberystwyth University, Curtis’s career took off in the early 1980s when he was a tax solicitor at the City law firm Fox and Gibbons. Most of their clients were from the Middle East and the astute, softly spoken Curtis developed an affinity with the Arabs, especially those from the Gulf States. In 1990 he set up his own law firm, Curtis & Co., specializing in commercial and property transactions.

      It was in 1997 that Curtis first recruited Russian clients when he started working for Khodorkovsky’s Bank Menatep. Some months later, in 1998, he advised the American defence and communications contractor Lockheed Martin when they were looking for a local (Russian-based) partner to help establish a satellite company for direct broadcasting in Russia. Menatep recommended Berezovsky and that is how the two men first met. Meetings took place in London between Lockheed directors and Berezovsky executives but the deal never materialized.

      Curtis was a gifted lawyer and a generous man, but he was also chaotic, disorganized, and extravagant. Despite having wealthy clients such as Mahdi Al-Tajir, the billionaire businessman and former customs official in Dubai, he was always overdrawn and beset by cash-flow problems. Even before the appearance of the Russians, he would buy Ferraris or Bentleys for rich new clients with his own money, something he could ill afford to do. He sometimes had to borrow cash from his own employees and once a client even had to help bail him out. He liked to take expensive holidays and was a regular gambler at London casinos. And he loved to buy jewellery, most especially from W. Roberts at Hatton Garden for his wife and girlfriends. He was also a frequent visitor to Chanel on New Bond Street, where one of his girlfriends worked.

      For a Mayfair law firm, the offices of Curtis & Co. were remarkably informal and the senior partner was gregarious and inclusive. Late on a Friday afternoon he would dispense champagne, his arm around the shoulders of members of his staff. People liked Curtis. He was amusing, endearing, and engendered trust. ‘He was one of those people who could remember everyone’s name and make them think that he was their closest and devoted friend,’ said a former colleague. ‘He was phenomenally charming and made you think that you were the most important person in the room.’ The Russians - by nature often sceptical, fearful, and paranoid - trusted him with hundreds of millions of their money. To the astonishment of his colleagues, he was able to buy properties, art, and jewellery on their behalf with few questions asked.

      On one occasion Curtis was given a Russian doll with a diamond necklace inside the ornament. His young daughter nonchalantly played with the doll and then threw it into her toy box. Curtis did not realize its value until he saw the same doll in a store in Red Square, Moscow. He was stunned at the price of the bejewelled doll and immediately retrieved it from his daughter’s playroom on his return.

      However, Curtis was too shrewd to be completely mesmerized by the mysterious new Russians. He knew there were risks and so applied the old adage of ‘know your client’ even more stringently. In 2000, shortly after starting to work for Berezovsky, he bought a private security firm, ISC Global Ltd, which he then used to investigate his intriguing new clients and their associates.

      By late 2000, Curtis was a close confidant of Berezovsky and it was to him that the oligarch turned with the problem of how to sell his ORT shares discreetly. Curtis’s solution required the use of a middleman, ostensibly in order to keep the parties at arm’s length from one another. With his network of high-worth clients spread around the world, many with their own financial networks through which money could be funnelled, Curtis was perfectly positioned to put the pieces in place.

      Soon Curtis was coordinating the deal. He set up accounts at Clydesdale Bank in London for Berezovsky and Patarkatsishvili and the ORT shares were transferred, via an intermediary, to an Abramovich-owned company, which then sold them on to the state-owned savings bank Sberbank for the same price - $160 million. Abramovich himself made no money from the clandestine deal, which was concluded by July 2002.

      After fees had been paid to the lawyers and other parties who had provided services, Berezovsky and Patarkatsishvili each received around $70 million. Curtis even suggested that Patarkatsishvili - by then based in Georgia - take residence in the United Arab Emirates to avoid paying any tax on his receipts. True to form, details of the commissions received by all the parties were never put in writing.

      Although Berezovsky received $70 million for his shares, he has long protested that they were worth more, and had indeed been offered more before he fled Russia. Yet some have claimed that he was fortunate to receive even this much for his 49 per cent stake in ORT, as Putin could easily have seized ORT and nationalized it, leaving Berezovsky with nothing.

      Even more infuriating for Berezovsky, Vladimir Glushkov was not released from prison. The Kremlin failed, he claimed, to keep its part of the agreement and Glushkov continued to languish in Lefortovo jail. For Putin, however, mission had been accomplished: the state had regained control of the popular television channel and Berezovsky could no longer use it as a propaganda weapon. Meanwhile, Abramovich was soon to capture another prize - the highly profitable Sibneft oil company.

      It was the division of this giant conglomerate that was to become the source of the next dispute between the two oligarchs. According to Abramovich he was the 100 per cent owner of Sibneft, although he was prepared to acknowledge that Berezovsky and Patarkatsishvili had played a crucial role in providing political protection when they had initially acquired the lucrative oil company together. For their part, Berezovsky and his business partner were adamant that they owned a substantial holding in Sibneft that was ‘held on trust’ on their behalf by Abramovich - as part of an option arrangement - even though there was no written agreement to that effect.

      It was agreed that in May 2001 Abramovich met Patarkatsishvili at Munich Airport to discuss Sibneft, but Abramovich and Berezovsky are completely at cross-purposes as to what the precise purpose of this meeting was and what went on at it. According to Berezovsky, Abramovich offered another stark warning to his former business associates: as long as they retained a stake in Sibneft, there was a risk of confiscation by the Kremlin. Boxed in again, Patarkatsishvili raised the subject of the imprisonment of Glushkov. Abramovich assured Patarkatsishvili, according to Berezovsky, that if they sold their holding in Sibneft, this time Glushkov would definitely be released. Berezovsky alleges that, once again, on this occasion, Abramovich was acting with Putin’s knowledge and approval.