For homesick russian tycoon, instant of ruin came in court

FOR HOMESICK RUSSIAN TYCOON, INSTANT OF RUIN CAME IN COURT

By SARAH LYALL

Published: March 24, 2013

LONDON — The moment of ruin for Boris A. Berezovsky, the exiled Russian oligarch who was found dead on Saturday outside London, came not when he fell out with the Kremlin, or when his latest long-term relationship broke up, or even when Russia sentenced him to prison in absentia.

It came instead in an unremarkable courtroom in London last August, when a judge told him exactly why his $5.1 billion lawsuit against Roman A. Abramovich, a former business associate, had failed so badly.

As Mr. Berezovsky — a man once so powerful he brokered national elections and treated multibillion-dollar companies as personal cash machines — looked on, stunned, the judge called him “dishonest,” “unimpressive” and “inherently unreliable.”

She said he had invented evidence, contradicted himself and made up his story as he went along. And, perhaps most devastating to a man whose inflated self-belief was nearly all he had left, she said he had “deluded himself into believing his own version of events.”

It is still unclear how Mr. Berezovsky, 67, died. The police said Sunday that they were treating his death as “unexplained.” But what is certain is that the humiliating court ruling, the rapid dissolution of his once-vast fortune, and a dawning realization that he would never see his homeland again had driven Mr. Berezovsky into despair. He had lived large for so long, it seemed, he did not know how to live small.

“He was so much distressed and depressed, and in so much trouble, as a result of that court ruling,” Alex Goldfarb, a longtime associate and former employee, said in an interview. “He thought this verdict had destroyed him, effectively.”

Mr. Berezovsky’s body was found, the police said, by an employee on Saturday afternoon on the floor of a bathroom at the house where he was living in Ascot, an upscale London suburb. The door had been locked from the inside, and the police said they were withholding “some details” until after the post-mortem, to give the family “time to speak to younger family members,” including, presumably, the last two of the six children he had with two successive wives and one longtime girlfriend.

According to a person with knowledge of the details, Mr. Berezovsky left no suicide note. But because nothing to do with him was ever simple, elaborate theories are being circulated. That the stress of the last few months had brought on a fatal heart attack. That, despondent over the loss of his money, prestige and homeland, Mr. Berezovsky had killed himself. That he had been murdered, just as his friend and fellow exile Alexander V. Litvinenko had been (in his case, by polonium poisoning) in 2006. Police officers trained in radiological forensics even searched the house and surroundings for evidence of chemical, radiological or biological material, but came up with nothing.

On Sunday afternoon, the police said they had found no evidence “to suggest third-party involvement,” but The Guardian quoted a friend of Mr. Berezovsky’s as saying that a scarf had been found near his body and speculating that he had been strangled.

Adding to the confusion, a spokesman for the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, said Saturday night that several months ago, Mr. Berezovsky had sent the president a letter in which he “admitted that he made a lot of mistakes” and begged for permission to return home. The Kremlin has produced no evidence of such a letter, but Mr. Berezovsky, one of Mr. Putin’s bitterest critics-in-exile, had certainly begun to speak in recent days of a deep homesickness.

“The last time I spoke with him, I was amazed: it was as if life had left him,” Mikhail Kozyrev, a television reporter who had worked with Mr. Berezovsky for years and talked with him a few weeks ago, said on the Russian channel Dozhd on Saturday. He said Mr. Berezovsky quizzed him about what had changed in stylish parts of Moscow, even asking what restaurants had opened.

“He had suddenly lost hope that he would at some point see again the homeland he loved,” Mr. Kozyrev said.

Mr. Berezovsky’s reputation for extravagance started after the Soviet Union fell and all of Russia seemed up for grabs. Backed by the Russian president at the time, Boris N. Yeltsin — whom he in turn helped prop up — Mr. Berezovsky began a series of investments and maneuvers in businesses involving cars, oil, media and airplanes. Court papers in his case with Mr. Abramovich, who remained in good favor with the Kremlin even as Mr. Berezovsky fell out with it later on, showed how both played fast and loose with money, cutting under-the-table deals, paying bribes and protection money, blackmailing and bullying their way into new ventures.

Most Russian oligarchs tend to end up acquiescing to the Kremlin, or else are killed, jailed, or exiled into oblivion. But Mr. Berezovsky’s life simply unraveled. He fled Russia in 2000, facing the prospect of imprisonment on fraud charges. Despite Mr. Putin’s best efforts, Mr. Berezovsky managed to hang on to a considerable portion of his $3 billion fortune — or at least to live as though he had. He appears to have been bankrolled, at least for a time, by his later nemesis: Mr. Abramovich said in court papers that he paid many of Mr. Berezovsky’s bills and gave him $305 million to “establish himself properly abroad.”