Once the toast of London, Russian oligarchs are now toast
They were welcomed in Britain with few questions asked, but life is set to change for exiles living in the UK away from Putin’s glare, writes Cristina Odone
WHEN a friend asked me to pick up her daughter from school recently, I had to squeeze past three gleaming black Mercs parked outside the gates.
Russian sounds blared on the Belgravia, London, street. Men in suits sat inside. Their shaved heads and earpieces told me that these men were not Daddy picking up Princess. No, they were bodyguards for Russian oligarchs’ children.
Russia’s aggression towards Ukraine may not affect the bodyguards, but it has changed their employers’ status.
US President Barack Obama has issued visa restrictions and asset freezes on a number of Russian officials. Alexei Navalny, unofficial leader of the opposition, wants these sanctions extended to include any oligarch with links to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
I hear a collective gasp as well-heeled Britons nervously wonder whether their oligarch pals will be on the list. Society is notoriously fickle and the same burly men and blingy women who were toasts of the town are now toast.
Hostesses, headmasters and Hello! magazine will give them the cold shoulder as ruthlessly as the Newport crowd shunned Gatsby once he was implicated in criminal activity. They should hang their heads in shame for being complicit in the oligarchs’ takeover of their adopted land.
Britain has been selling respectability. Investor visas — just a hop away from citizenship — cost a mere £1-million (about R18-million); a self-respecting tycoon spends more than that on a birthday party.
Libel lawyers deterred anyone from asking hard questions about where the oligarchs’ money came from or what their ulterior motives might be. Obliging bankers and accoun- tants helped clients to run rings around Britain’s money-laundering laws.
Having an oligarch as owner, patron or guest had the social cachet of attending one of Gatsby’s parties. Everyone loved them. Russian money was cascading down to ordinary people. We were all supposed to be grateful as it went into saving a football club, endowing a college or sponsoring a gallery.
The oligarch became everyone’s new best friend, an establishment fixture who smiled from the pages of the glossies and waved from the Ascot Royal Enclosure.
Their extravagance was reassuring — someone still believed in the UK economy. An oligarch’s bash made Elton John’s look like a vicar’s tea party.
By dint of marrying a professional Putin-basher, I was out of step with this collective oligarch-o-philia. My husband, a former Moscow correspondent, had written bleak (but with hindsight, prescient) polemics about Kremlin corruption and its tentacles in the West.
We paid the price for his warnings in social terms, becoming personae non gratae at some smart parties.
It turned out lots of people we knew owed their living to the new Russians: lawyers, journalists, boutique owners. Those who kept us on their guest list would issue clear instructions. I remember the hostess at a grand drinks party sailing towards us and hissing at my husband: “Don’t go on about Putin, we have an oligarch here!”
It so happened the oligarch in question was the late Boris Berezovsky, who hated the Russian leader even more than my husband did. They spent the rest of the party exchanging gloomy predictions about his insatiable appetite for power.
They have been vindicated, although the hapless Berezovsky, who, debt-ridden and desperate, committed suicide last year, did not live to see it.
Just as in F Scott Fitzgerald’s book, money had blinded people to the truth: the Gatsbys of this world are never quite what they seem. — © The Daily Telegraph, London