First interview with Sergei Pugachev: 'Putin's banker' now lives in fear of man he put into power
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/28/sergei-pugachev-putins-banker-interview-lives-in-fear
Exclusive: Former billionaire gives first interview since fleeing Britain about alleged death threats, being on the run and the man he helped get elected. Once known as ‘Putin’s banker’, Sergei Pugachev was a billionaire financier in Moscow. After falling out with President Vladimir Putin he is in exile in the south of France.
Sergei Pugachev doesn’t look like a man on the run. He is in good humour, dressed in jeans and a casual shirt. But the former Russian banker – once close to Vladimir Putin, and now his bitter opponent – is elusive about how he recently escaped from London to France. “I can’t go into details. I didn’t swim the English channel,” he says, speaking from his new location in Nice on the Côte D’Azur. “It was all absolutely legal,” he adds.
Pugachev is embroiled in a battle with the Russian state, in which he was once a privileged insider. In 2011, he left Russia and settled largely in London, with his British partner Alexandra Tolstoy and their three small children. His exit from Moscow came after a gradual cooling in his relationship with Russia’s president and, as Pugachev tells it, an astonishing raid by the Russian government on his $15bn (£9.6bn) business empire.
Once known as “Putin’s banker”, Pugachev owned two major shipyards, the world’s biggest mine and significant real estate in Moscow and St Petersburg. Pugachev says all this was taken from him – the asset grab similar to those suffered by other Russian entrepreneurs, the difference being its brazen scale.
The Soviets did this kind of thing, burning their own founders and loyalists. Shows Putin is a chip off the old Stalin block.
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