Читать книгу Putin’s People онлайн | страница 14

For all his flaws, Pugachev insisted he had been caught in a Russian state vendetta pursued through the UK courts. The Kremlin seemed intent on quashing any notion that he’d ever been well-connected in the Kremlin, or that he could have any knowledge that could be damaging to it. It had been able to suppress any political connotation to the case by leveraging the diminishing knowledge of Russia in the UK intelligence services, which had been distracted by monitoring the Islamic terrorist threat, and Pugachev’s own low profile. Before things had got tough in London, Pugachev had never given an interview in his life. Few knew who he was. Most people believed it was the recently deceased oligarch Boris Berezovsky who had helped bring Putin to power. Lawyers at Hogan Lovells had been told that Pugachev was a nobody, and the case against him had nothing to do with politics. ‘I’ve not seen any evidence of what he was doing in the Kremlin,’ said one person close to the legal team. ‘We have to be extremely careful. Pugachev seems to say whatever he wants. The people I have spoken to just say he was a blatant crook.’[13]

But in fact Pugachev had worked at the heart of the Kremlin, and had been privy to some of its deepest secrets, including how it was exactly that Putin came to power. This seemed to be one of the main reasons the Kremlin was so intent on pursuing him, and making sure he was tied up in legal knots. Even before the Kremlin took over his business empire, he’d been seeking to leave Russia, to escape the endless intrigue of business there. Already, he’d been sidelined by Putin’s KGB allies from St Petersburg, and he’d begun seeking French citizenship in 2007. For those on the inside, Pugachev was being punished precisely for seeking to exit the tight-knit system that ruled Russia, the mafia clan which no one was ever meant to leave. ‘Pugachev was like a kidney. He was essential for the functioning of the system. But he lost his mind and thought he could leave and work on his own business. Of course the order was given to destroy him,’ said a senior Russian banker involved in financial operations for the Kremlin.[14]