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An incredible story, told through the lives of Russia's billionaire Oligarchs, of a country dominated by a dictator. From a bungled privatisation of massive state-owned assets in the nineties we explore how Putin has regained control of the powerful Oligarchs and how they've influenced the world.
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01:38Há 12 anos depois que a rússia enfrentou o capitalismo, o homem mais riquei do país foi arriscado e colocado em uma caixa.
01:46Ele foi colocado por esse homem, o presidente da rússia.
01:51Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.
02:0030 anos atrás, fora das asas da comunidade, uma nova economia capitalista foi nascida.
02:07For a brief part of history, it offered hope of a better life for all.
02:13But the new free market descended into chaos,
02:18with widespread food shortages and increased crime.
02:24For a few, it was an opportunity to gain enormous wealth.
02:29We saw a new super rich class emerge with incredible speed.
02:36They live extravagant lifestyles, with mega yachts, supercars and mansions.
02:43But their lives are always under the crosshairs of their leader,
02:48a ruthless ex-KGB agent who asserts his power.
02:53Putin has to be the richest of the rich.
02:55He has to be the oligarch, the billionaire to beat all the other oligarchs and billionaires.
02:59Since the invasion of Ukraine, he has demanded their loyalty.
03:06But any people, even more so the Russian people, will always be able to distinguish true patriots from scum and traitors.
03:18Now the oligarchs face a grave crisis, caught between sanctions in the West and a backlash at home.
03:31And no one encapsulates their story better than a former street trader.
03:36Roman Abramovich is best known for buying Chelsea Football Club in 2003.
03:53He made his money through Sibnyevk, a Russian oil major.
03:58And he owned stakes in steel giant Evraz, Norelisk Nickel, and the country's largest aluminum company, Rousseau.
04:09But he had humble beginnings.
04:12Roman Abramovich was an orphan.
04:15He grew up in very poor circumstances.
04:19Abramovich developed some highly successful trading skills, starting out selling rubber ducks.
04:26And he clearly had an entrepreneurial gift.
04:30But the young businessman really gathered some wealth by trading oil.
04:35Through his oil trading activities, he eventually acquired some very powerful political connections.
04:45In the early 90s, President Yeltsin was selling off the vast state assets to raise much needed cash for the flailing economy.
04:55Abramovich made his way to Yeltsin's inner circle behind a colorful and highly influential character, Boris Berezovsky.
05:04Berezovsky noticed Yeltsin often struck deals between sets on the tennis courts.
05:11Immediately, the people with the best connections to the existing Russian government under Boris Yeltsin,
05:21they were the people who immediately benefited.
05:24In 1995, Abramovich acquired a stake in the state oil company named Sibnyevk.
05:33The stock went on to explode in value after the deal was done.
05:40Abramovich was reported to have been firmly in favor of Yeltsin.
05:45He even lived in an apartment in the Kremlin compound.
05:50This catapulted him into the billionaire class, and he became an influential figure.
05:56Abramovich is someone who really very carefully thinks about every investment, every deal that he does.
06:06He's not impulsive or instinctive.
06:09In 2000, the oligarchs supported Putin to power.
06:15Some of these oligarchic figures thought for themselves that he is a forward-thinking, perhaps even progressive, moderate politician.
06:25He is someone who perhaps they can help steer, just as they've done with President Yeltsin.
06:30But they were in for a nasty shock.
06:33It's very clear, by the first and second years of Putin's term in power, that the oligarchs have supported someone for President that they underestimated.
06:43President Putin himself is going to be the actual man and regime in charge.
06:49Putin launched a crackdown on the oligarchs.
07:01And so he outmaneuvers all of the old-style oligarchs, people like Boris Berezovsky and others who'd been close to Yeltsin,
07:08who thinks that they can manipulate Putin.
07:10And they find out very quickly that they actually cannot.
07:14Berezovsky and Putin had a huge falling out.
07:18And Berezovsky left the country in 2000.
07:24In 2005, Abramovich sold his stake in Sibneft to the Russian government for over 13 billion dollars.
07:33Berezovsky tried to sue Abramovich for breach of contract, and the biggest civil case in UK history.
07:41He claimed that he and Abramovich were part-owners of Sibneft.
07:45Roman Abramovich, the Russian billionaire, has been defending himself at the High Court in London against accusations that he betrayed a business rival.
07:54The allegation is made by Boris Berezovsky, who claims that he was bullied, in effect, into selling oil shares at a fraction of their worth.
08:03In statements submitted to the court, he said, I was not his protege, he was not my mentor.
08:11I was quite surprised by his extravagant lifestyle.
08:14However, I was never interested in imitating this lifestyle.
08:18The judge ruled in favor of Abramovich, saying that Berezovsky had never been an owner.
08:28Berezovsky was left close to bankruptcy.
08:31Sometimes I had the impression that Putin himself wrote this judgment.
08:36Sometimes I had this impression.
08:41Less than a year later, Berezovsky was found dead at his country home, with a ligature around his neck.
08:49The coroner returned an open verdict.
08:52Abramovich, meanwhile, was free to splash his cash on some very extravagant toys.
09:10One of his yachts, the Eclipse, is worth 500 million dollars.
09:15It's rumored it costs around a million dollars just to fill it up with fuel.
09:19It has two helicopter pads, two swimming pools, several hot tubs, a mini submarine, and a missile detection system.
09:39After Putin's invasion of Ukraine, Abramovich's future is uncertain.
09:44The UK froze some of his assets, including his beloved Chelsea football club, which was later sold.
09:52Whether Abramovich will be able to hold onto his billions remains to be seen.
09:57In 1917, the Bolshevik Revolution brought about the Soviet Union and the first communist country.
10:11It lasted for most of the 20th century.
10:18Following Marxist economic theories, Soviet leaders from Lenin onwards banned private ownership.
10:28So, Russia started out as a country where all the wealth was held by the state.
10:33Doviyai, no proviyai. Trust, but verify.
10:50The Cold War began to thaw in 1985, when Yeltsin's predecessor, Gorbachev, befriended US President Ronald Reagan.
11:04The Berlin Wall came down in 1989, as the world looked on with hope.
11:11Troops took control of the key section of the Berlin Wall at the Brandenburg Gate early this morning.
11:20They stopped the party, but any hopes they had of stopping the West Berliners destroying the wall were soon dashed.
11:27As dozens of young men pulled on a rope and chains, the chant went up,
11:31The Soviet Union was fast forwarded into the modern era.
11:39This first taste of capitalism ignited an entrepreneurial spirit.
11:45They filled up the cars, went to China, came back and sold things ten times, a hundred times the price.
11:55Russians started wanting a wealthier lifestyle.
11:58Then, in December 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed.
12:05It begins in the Baltic states, soon extends into Eastern European republics themselves in places like Ukraine, places like Moldova.
12:13Every one of the republics has declared independence. There is no more Soviet Union.
12:19But the fall of the Soviet Union brought new problems.
12:22Gorbachev fell out of favor, and Boris Yeltsin became the new leader of an independent Russia.
12:30He inherited a country in dire straits.
12:35It was broke. There was very little food in the stores.
12:38The banks were on the brink of collapse. The economy was on its knees.
12:44And so President Yeltsin and the regime, they desperately needed money.
12:52He turned to the West for help.
12:56American advisers said, well, what you need is to sell everything off, privatize everything, move to a free market economy, and that's the way forward.
13:06Yeltsin issued vouchers to the entire Russian population.
13:13They gave a voucher to every person. So there's 150 million vouchers in circulation.
13:20The vouchers were to be used to purchase shares in state-owned companies.
13:25Only a few knew their true value.
13:27Many people wouldn't know what to do with these vouchers. They had to sell them off because they were so poor.
13:36And clever people bought a lot of these vouchers and through that could then take over state properties.
13:46However, the vouchers didn't solve the need to pay the wages and pensions.
13:52Yeltsin needed cash and quick. And one man had a solution.
14:08Vladimir Potanin was the richest man in Russia in March 2022.
14:12He set up in Teros Bank and made his fortune by acquiring Noralist Nickel, a company close to bankruptcy under communism that quickly found enormous commercial value.
14:29He is known as the brains behind the scheme called Loans for Shares.
14:35The financial plan was the birth of the oligarchy.
14:38He was really the architect, the mastermind behind Russia's privatization program.
14:45In the 90s, he was really known as the Uber oligarch of all.
14:51The way the scheme worked was the well-connected lent the Kremlin money.
14:57And if the government defaulted on the loan, they received shares in the country's national industries.
15:03By his own admission, he and other oligarchs reaped the rewards.
15:07Because of the absence of strict regulation, this helped us to become rich and powerful, let's say, faster than we could if we worked in, let's say, normal conditions.
15:20And his commercial awareness paid off with a political role.
15:23His great financial clout and influence even brought him a place in the Yeltsin government.
15:36In 1996, Potanin became deputy prime minister.
15:39But while a few prospered, many ordinary Russians did not.
15:42The vast number of Russian people were completely ripped off and the new free market economy didn't work.
15:51In the sense it didn't deliver for the Russian people.
15:54There's literal starvation in provinces in Russia.
15:58Professors had to become taxi drivers. Nurses had to become prostitutes.
16:02And so there wasn't a person in Russia that was happy at the end of the Yeltsin era.
16:14Potanin says Russia needed a quick solution before the country slipped back into communism.
16:20But he acknowledges it wasn't faultless.
16:22The method was not, let's say, 100% fair. The rules were not clear. But please believe that it was difficult to make it quickly and the opposition was very strong.
16:42Yeltsin was popular among the people. But after a series of uncomfortable televised appearances, faith in his leadership waned.
16:49By 1999, it was the end of the road for Yeltsin. Alcoholism took its toll and his health deteriorated.
17:03The following year, Vladimir Putin became president of Russia. A new era for the oligarchs began.
17:12Born in St. Petersburg in 1952, Putin joined the Russian security services, the KGB.
17:19KGB at age 23 and soon worked his way up the ranks.
17:25He'd obviously been trained from the very beginnings of joining the KGB as a young man back in the 1970s in what was then Leningrad to conceal information about himself.
17:38He was selected as a potential successor to Yeltsin and took up a place in the administration in 1996.
17:45He became a popular choice for leadership.
17:52The public believed him to be a strong leader, a religious man, and somebody that would crush corruption.
17:59This bare-chested bear of a man who is willing to do what these effeminate Western leaders are not willing to do.
18:12The oligarchs supported his rise, expecting him to be progressive like Yeltsin.
18:17But Putin had no intention of allowing the oligarchs control over his presidency.
18:25Yeltsin fell prey to the machinations of the various oligarchs around him.
18:30Putin does not want to be in that position. Putin has to be the richest of the rich.
18:33He has to be the oligarch, the billionaire to beat all the other oligarchs and billionaires.
18:37He rallied popularity among the public, presenting himself as a charismatic action man, riding with bikers, flying microlights, spearfishing, cuddling animals and children.
18:58He won the public's affections.
19:03But his most popular move was reasserting control.
19:07His currency?
19:09Fear.
19:10He began with a bang by pursuing the most famous oligarch in all of Russia.
19:31In 2003, Mikhail Khodorkovsky was the wealthiest man in Russia.
19:48He made his fortune from oil.
19:52Khodorkovsky had a background in chemistry and a gift for pioneering new businesses.
19:58He's a very smart guy from a technical institution.
20:03He's very much an independent thinker.
20:07But he was too far ahead of his time.
20:10In 1988, he established one of the country's first private banks.
20:16He loaned the government money and struck gold when the government defaulted on the loan.
20:22And he acquired a 78% stake in the state oil company, Yukos.
20:29Yukos Oil Company, it became incredibly profitable and lucrative.
20:34And it was making billions of dollars.
20:35And then he does something that is quite surprising for many of these Russian oligarchs.
20:44He actually, over time, wants to transform it into a Western-style company.
20:50And actually to run it as a for-profit concern, not as a cash cow that might be still linked into people close to the Kremlin.
20:56He then used some of his income to fund opposition parties.
21:05This was a no-go for the Kremlin.
21:10He was seen as a potential rival to Putin.
21:14So Putin was persuaded that he should be taken down.
21:18The opportunity came when Khodorkovsky openly challenged Putin about state corruption on television.
21:27The footage would mark a historical turning point.
21:31The size of corruption in Russia is about 30 billion dollars.
21:37This is 10-12% of the VVP.
21:40Putin appeared to issue a quiet but devastating counter-attack,
21:47accusing him of tax evasion.
21:50Some other oil companies, such as Yukos,
21:55have superpowers.
21:57How did it get them?
21:59This is a question that is discussed today on the topic.
22:02In particular,
22:05such questions as the payment of taxes.
22:08We have discussed this time.
22:13Then, on October 25th, 2003,
22:17Khodorkovsky's life was turned upside down.
22:20Khodorkovsky was on his private jet.
22:22He landed on the runway,
22:24and his jet was surrounded by members of the Federal Security Service.
22:29They arrested Khodorkovsky.
22:30In Russia, when you are put on trial, there's a 99.7% conviction rate in criminal court in Russia.
22:45And then Putin allows the television cameras to come in the room to film the richest man in Russia sitting in a cage.
22:55And this had a profound effect on all the other oligarchs.
22:59Imagine that you're on your yacht, you're parked off in Antibes, France, flick on CNN, and there you see a guy far smarter, far more powerful, far richer than you, sitting in a cage.
23:15What's the natural reaction?
23:21You don't want to sit in that cage for yourself.
23:24Khodorkovsky was found guilty of fraud and sent to jail.
23:28He claimed it was a political persecution.
23:34So Khodorkovsky sits in a, essentially, gulag for a good decade to warn other oligarchs of the limits of their ownership and the limits of their commercial independence.
23:53Khodorkovsky was eventually released in 2013.
23:56He was flown to Berlin and then moved to London.
24:03Today, he is one of Putin's fiercest critics.
24:09You have to understand, we're dealing with a criminal group in power and not a state of law.
24:16This group, his power rests on force.
24:19Bill Browder knows what it's like to be on the wrong side of Vladimir Putin.
24:28He was one of the early foreign investors in Russia's new stock market.
24:34In 2005, he was deported and his assets seized.
24:42He testified about the impact of Khodorkovsky's trial in front of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee.
24:48Other oligarchs went to Vladimir Putin and said, what do we have to do to not sit in the cage?
24:54And he said, it's very straightforward, 50%.
24:57Not 50% for the Russian government or 50% for the presidential administration of Russia, 50% for Vladimir Putin.
25:02And so he became the richest man in the world in that moment.
25:06No one is sure if Putin is the richest man in the world.
25:09But Browder is convinced about the role of the oligarchs.
25:13Oligarch network is feeding him massive amounts of money and doing his political bidding.
25:19And they hold his money for him.
25:21Got it.
25:22So if you want to get Vladimir Putin, sanction the top oligarchs as well.
25:28In response, other oligarchs from the time have strenuously denied Browder's claims.
25:35While investigative journalists have tried to get to the bottom of Putin's purse strings.
25:41But the person who's been most effective of this has been Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition figure.
25:46And that's why he is in jail and that's why there was an attempt to assassinate him using Novichok.
25:52The same substance but in a different form that was used to poison Sergei Skripal and his daughter Ulrich in Salisbury.
26:04Novichok is a deadly nerve agent, a chemical weapon.
26:07This was a very serious effort to eliminate Alexei Navalny because he's been exquisitely capable of unraveling and spooling an awful lot of the threads behind the corruption, the kleptocracy that surrounds Putin.
26:23Navalny survived.
26:26But on return to Russia, was jailed for breaking bail conditions while receiving life-saving treatment.
26:33He returns to Moscow knowing full well he's going to be arrested.
26:37He releases a video that he spent an awful lot of time producing about the ownership threads that he and his team have traced to an enormous, luxurious, sumptuous villa on the Russian Black Sea.
26:51Which is not just a palace, it puts Versailles to shame.
26:56Navalny's team bypassed a no-fly zone with a drone to capture what is nicknamed Putin's Palace in all its glory.
27:03The property is reported to be worth over one billion dollars and is full of extravagant opulence.
27:13It isn't a country house or a residence, it's an entire city or rather a kingdom.
27:18Among its many features, this green mound is reported to house an underground ice hockey rink.
27:22He was almost mocking Putin for his lack of taste.
27:33There was this horrible pole dancing room and an aqua disco and just really in poor taste.
27:40Putin denied any ties to the palace and a Russian billionaire later claimed ownership.
27:47And in March 2022, as the bombs rained down on Ukraine, Navalny was given a further nine years in jail.
28:02It's unclear whether this was linked to Navalny's claims that this superyacht also belongs to Putin.
28:13Press reports valued the Scheherazade at around 700 million dollars, making it one of the most expensive superyachts in the world.
28:21The British captain denied the superyacht belonged to Putin.
28:27It was, however, seized by Italian authorities.
28:31As for Putin's other critics, Bill Browder and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, they both fled to London.
28:38The city has become a favorite destination, too, for oligarchs.
28:42Alexander Lebedev made his money buying the Russian National Reserve Bank and acquired investments in Gazprom and Aeroflot.
28:58Alexander Lebedev is a former KGB officer.
29:03He was stationed in London in the late Soviet era in the Soviet embassy.
29:07He's since been able to establish a great deal of clout within London's establishment itself.
29:17Alexander Lebedev's road to riches began when he was stationed at the Soviet embassy in London from 1988 to 1992.
29:27His job as a KGB officer was to really gather economic intelligence, commercial intelligence in terms of the British economy.
29:35He was a very smart guy, understood economics.
29:40And he realized that there were opportunities to become very wealthy.
29:45By 2008, he was a multi-billionaire.
29:51But then in a confrontational television debate show on the financial crisis,
29:56he threw a punch at a property tycoon after claiming he'd been threatened.
30:00He was charged with hooliganism.
30:01I was under investigation by eight investigators for something I did in public under 14 cameras with 300 witnesses.
30:20And I was expecting my sentence, risking five years in prison.
30:28I got 130 hours of community service.
30:31But I really became much quieter for a few years.
30:35Maybe perhaps I've lost most of my business.
30:38He became a publisher rather than a luxury-loving billionaire and seemed relieved to lose that badge.
30:48He came off the Forbes list and I'm so happy.
30:51I never bought anything in the south of France.
30:53Boats.
30:55I don't like it.
30:56Then in 2009, he bought the loss-making London paper, The Evening Standard, for one British pound.
31:06Alexander Lebedev saw the acquisition of The Evening Standard and later The Independent as a way of enhancing his influence in the UK.
31:17It wasn't a commercial profit-making enterprise.
31:20Lebedev disputes such claims.
31:24He and his son Yevgeny have raised considerable sums for charity, including a foundation promoting a free press.
31:35He organizes charity events and lavish parties, inviting the rich and famous.
31:42Yevgeny became close friends with Boris Johnson, and they famously spent a night on the streets of London.
31:50The much-publicized footage showed the two playing to the cameras, but the rapport between them was clear.
31:56This may look like a bit of a stunt, and in a way, of course it is a bit of a stunt.
32:01You know, we are just getting a tiny idea of what it's like to sleep out.
32:07I trod in a big puddle over there, so I got slightly wet right foot.
32:11I saved your life.
32:13Russian oligarchs understood the importance of having good relations with politicians here.
32:20The Evening Standard supported Boris Johnson during his time as London mayor.
32:25Boris Johnson invited out to the Italian villa owned by Evgeny Lebedev and went there on quite a few occasions for parties.
32:34And then, you know, became closer and closer, and eventually Evgeny Lebedev was awarded a peerage.
32:43Today the former KGB officer's son sits in the House of Lords.
32:48He was given his peerage for his services to charity.
32:52The appointment caused a stir in the UK Parliament.
32:55On the 17th of March 2020, when British intelligence reportedly warned against granting a peerage to the Prime Minister's close friend,
33:05and now Lord Lebedev of Hampton and Siberia.
33:08So can he tell the House what changed between the security warning and the appointment?
33:16Boris Johnson denied intervening over Lord Lebedev's peerage.
33:21And Lebedev himself denies he poses any threat to national security.
33:28The Lebedevs are not the only Russian tycoons who have made London their new home.
33:39The arrival of Russian oligarchs in London has supercharged the economy.
33:44Russians like to spend big.
33:49When the Russian oligarchs moved to London, one of the priorities was to buy property.
33:55As a bolt hole, their favorite areas would be Knightsbridge, particularly close to Harrods.
34:02If they have properties within the heart of the British establishment, which is Mayfair, Belgravia, Kensington, Chelsea, and those areas, they feel accepted.
34:14There's been a number of unexplained deaths of Russians in Britain.
34:18Alexander Litvinenko was an ex-KGB agent who became a British citizen in 2006.
34:28He was a former member of the security services who essentially had defected to the West.
34:35In 1998, he accused Putin's KGB of plotting to assassinate Boris Berezovsky and killing a journalist, just two weeks before he himself mysteriously fell ill.
34:52On November 1st, 2006, Litvinenko drank deadly tea in the Millennium Hotel in London's Mayfair.
35:00He was known as the man who solved his own audacious murder when he guessed that he'd been poisoned.
35:12It became a diplomatic incident.
35:15Putin wanted to make an example out of him, but he also wanted to test the British system of justice.
35:23And he discovered that there really is not a very robust system of justice.
35:27Putin has always denied the Russian state is involved in any sponsored assassinations.
35:34Some oligarchs have also tried to make inroads into the American political system.
35:41Oleg Deripaska made his fortune in medals.
35:47He had a modest upbringing, largely raised by his grandparents.
35:51My grandmother, she was always careful with the light. There was no light in the house.
36:00He started trading in medals at a time when the Soviet Union had collapsed and lawlessness reigned.
36:11Aluminum promised massive profits and blood was spilled.
36:15Gangsters and businessmen vied to control the industry.
36:20Around 100 people were murdered.
36:23Although there is no suggestion that Deripaska was involved in any criminality,
36:29he did end up in control after the feuding subsided.
36:33Deripaska was able to emerge on top from a period which in the 90s had been really vicious.
36:42The era was known as the Aluminium Wars.
36:46He has claimed in the past that he restored order to the industry.
36:51It was like a wild west in Russia.
36:56It's not a period he remembers with pride.
37:00To go through without any single thing which you could later believe, you know, was wrong.
37:09It was very difficult.
37:12But I believe whatever I did, I can sense that I'm proud.
37:17But I believe, you know, that I did the right thing.
37:23Deripaska married into the Yeltsin Circle and quickly adjusted to life under Putin.
37:30The Kremlin had taken control of law enforcement.
37:35Most businessmen only owned their businesses through the Kremlin's grace.
37:41Deripaska managed to maintain a working relationship with Putin.
37:46The oligarchs are now going to be subservient to the state itself.
37:52And this is a shift, this is a new dynamic.
37:55Putin showed who was the boss on national TV.
37:59After Deripaska shut down a metals plant, leaving workers without wages.
38:04I believe that you have made your opponents of your ambitions, not professionalism, but just trivialness.
38:18Deripaska was called up like a naughty schoolboy to sign an agreement to reopen his plant.
38:24Part of his plan was expanding in the USA.
38:40And in 2003, he hired former Senator Bob Dole to lobby on his behalf.
38:50He's able to go to one of the leaders of the American Republican Party and say,
38:55I would like to give you a slice of my newfound wealth in order to access your country, your policy making apparatus.
39:02Dole agrees, Dole takes the money, and the doors of the United States of America are suddenly open to Mr. Deripaska.
39:09Deripaska became known for throwing lavish parties at Davos, the World Economic Forum.
39:15He is succeeding in creating this image of himself as a globe-trotting member of the global elite.
39:24Deripaska built a presence across the globe.
39:28In 2006, he formed N Plus Group, and Roussoul became the world's largest aluminum producer.
39:34He really hit the headlines with the Mueller inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election.
39:49He was very close with Paul Manafort, who was the former chief of staff in the Trump campaign.
39:57The investigation into alleged links between Donald Trump's election campaign and Russia has taken a dramatic turn,
40:06with the news that his former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, had been indicted by a federal grand jury.
40:14Manafort was sentenced to seven years in prison in 2019.
40:18Traitor!
40:20His convictions included tax fraud, bank fraud, money laundering, and unregistered lobbying.
40:28A year later, he was pardoned by President Trump.
40:35The US imposed sanctions on Roussoul, N Plus, and seized some of Deripaska's assets in 2018.
40:43Oleg Deripaska denied all the charges leveled against him.
40:48He attempted to clear his name by suing the US Treasury.
40:53Reporters asked him about the case.
40:55And I know that I was punished only because I was a Russian businessman.
41:00There was no other Russian explanation.
41:03And I hope to see what they will present in court, you know, when they need to present their answers.
41:08The suit was unsuccessful.
41:11But the US Treasury under Trump did lift the sanctions on Roussoul and N Plus,
41:15after Deripaska reduced his majority ownership.
41:20Trump's relationship to Putin has been much discussed.
41:22And so Putin was really more of an image for Trump, of something that he wanted to be himself.
41:29He had degrees of autocrat envy.
41:30And he certainly saw Putin, you know, on that surface as being the richest of the rich, potentially the richest man in the world, running a country as if it was his own, as if it was his own asset.
41:44And so he also saw him as being not just fabulously rich, but fabulously powerful.
41:51And as for Deripaska.
41:53He has come a long, long way from being simply a rising businessman with close ties, allegedly, to organized crime.
42:02And in 2021, Deripaska suffered further trouble in the US when the FBI raided his homes in New York and Washington DC.
42:11And when Putin invaded Ukraine, the UK imposed further sanctions on Deripaska, freezing his assets there, too.
42:26What we've concluded is that there is enough connection, enough of a link between the Putin regime and the individuals in question to justify the action.
42:37I can see that people connected to the Putin regime need to be sanctioned, and that's what we're doing.
42:49Thanks to Putin's invasion of Ukraine, the oligarchs have seen multiple super yachts, private jets and stately homes seized by Western Europe and the United States.
42:59The US government announced in February 2022, a new klepto capture unit to enforce sanctions that have been imposed.
43:11We will leave no stone unturned in our efforts to investigate, arrest and prosecute those whose criminal acts enable the Russian government to continue this unjust war.
43:28One of the most loyal of the new breed of oligarchs is from Putin's hometown of St. Petersburg.
43:34Evgeny Prigozhin is alleged to have made his money from large catering contracts with the Kremlin.
43:49Out of the most recent oligarchs, those who were closest to Putin, Mr. Prigozhin is probably the most interesting, perhaps the most obvious candidate for scrutiny.
44:02Prigozhin is actually, by all accounts, a pretty talented guy.
44:08He is, by all accounts, an incredibly talented chef.
44:12In fact, he is known as Putin's chef.
44:21He served jail time for robbery, fraud and involving minors in crime.
44:25After his release, he became a hot dog vendor before segwaying into the restaurant business.
44:33Putin became a regular patron of his restaurants and Prigozhin became a confidant.
44:40He received large contracts to feed Russia's schools and military, as well as catering for state banquets.
44:46And in 2002, President George W. Bush was a guest, with Prigozhin always by Putin's side.
44:57I had a rather unexpected encounter with Mr. Prigozhin that I was unaware of until I saw some footage.
45:03I'm sitting next to Putin at one of these expert dinners, and Mr. Prigozhin is the person who is serving us with the food.
45:13I hadn't realized that the whole time that I had been at this dinner, which was all heavily staged and orchestrated,
45:21Mr. Prigozhin was part of all of that staging and orchestration and was in charge of all of the catering.
45:25Quite whether Prigozhin's role was purely food-related is a little murky.
45:32History would later see him accused of cooking up some very different recipes for the Kremlin.
45:42He begins moving into a new space entirely, the social media space.
45:47Prigozhin was accused of attempting to sway the 2016 U.S. general election.
45:53by creating something called the Internet Research Agency.
46:01He was someone who could foresee the impact and influence of social media in and of itself.
46:09In 2018, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted 13 Russians connected to the agency.
46:15The defendants allegedly conducted what they called information warfare against the United States.
46:23Twelve of the individual defendants worked at various times for a company called Internet Research Agency, LLC,
46:32a Russian company based in St. Petersburg.
46:34Yevgeny Viktorovich Prigozhin funded the conspiracy.
46:44U.S. Intelligence described the agency as a troll farm,
46:49which it said employed fake accounts or bots on major social media networks.
46:54These were Russian trolls sitting at keyboards in St. Petersburg targeting American tensions to show chaos across the board.
47:05They used stolen or fictitious American identities, fraudulent bank accounts, and false identification documents.
47:14According to the indictment, the Americans did not know that they were communicating with Russians.
47:19But a lot of it was really amplifying the really hot-button topics and the divisions and cleavages that have merged,
47:28for example, gun rights, abortion, religious identity.
47:33Prigozhin denied interfering in the 2016 election, saying,
47:38if they want to see the devil, let them.
47:40In 2020, U.S. Intelligence also announced that Prigozhin was believed to be behind a private army called Wagner.
47:51He has been connected to all number of other extraterritorial Kremlin interests.
47:58The Wagner group has been heavily involved in operations overseas for Russia,
48:04where the Russians don't want to risk conventional military forces.
48:11Military analysts say Wagner offers Russian military plausible deniability.
48:19Prigozhin was sanctioned by the EU and the UK for alleged links to Wagner activities.
48:28The EU accused Wagner of serious human rights abuses, including torture.
48:34In 2021, the FBI offered $250,000 for information leading to the arrest of Prigozhin.
48:45He has been identified by the highest levels of the American government.
48:49One of the most successful players in Russian efforts at destabilizing Western countries, including the United States of America.
48:57Prigozhin has always denied any connection with Wagner activities or any wrongdoing.
49:08In recent years, intelligence services have been closing in on Putin's finances.
49:14And so have journalists.
49:15In early 2016, hundreds of journalists around the world published an unprecedented look into the world of the offshore economy.
49:27This was known as the Panama Papers.
49:32At its heart was information leaked from a firm called Mossack Fonseca.
49:36It was a law firm, an offshoring firm based in, as the name says, Panama, providing offshoring and anonymous wealth services to any client around the world.
49:51In March 2018, Mossack Fonseca said it was shut down as a result of reputational damage due to the Panama Papers leak.
50:02It denied any wrongdoing.
50:05In 2020, prosecutors issued arrest warrants for its partners on charges of accessory to tax evasion and forming a criminal organization.
50:14But there was one figure in particular that emerged in Panama Papers that I think everybody kind of raised an eyebrow at.
50:29He wasn't an especially well known figure, certainly for his politics or even for his wealth in and of itself.
50:36He was known of all things for his musical talents.
50:40Sergei Roldugin is a professional musician and artistic director at the St. Petersburg House of Music.
51:00It is well known that he is a close personal friend of Vladimir Putin.
51:05Roldugin is one of the figures emerging in the Panama Papers as secretly controlling a remarkable portfolio of wealth using some of these offshore anonymous financial vehicles.
51:18The Panama Papers unveiled a $2 billion offshore scheme involving Roldugin.
51:25Some question whether there was more to this than meets the eye.
51:28Putin claimed the transactions were for buying expensive instruments.
51:35Roldugin denied wrongdoing, saying any wealth linked to him was donations from businessmen to buy musical instruments for young Russians.
51:42Putin's finances have long been the subject of speculation, as has his relationship with some Russian oligarchs.
52:02But as billions are wiped off their collective worth as a result of Putin's bloody war, that bond faces its greatest test.
52:20Perhaps it was the oligarchs he was referring to in this angry address.
52:27I do not at all judge those who have a villa in Miami, or on the French Riviera, who can't do without fra-gras, oysters, or the so-called gender freedoms.
52:40But the issue here is not in that.
52:43But in the fact that many of these people, by their very nature, are mentally located exactly there.
52:50and not here, not with our people, not with Russia.
52:58So I think Putin does see himself as a czar in many respects.
53:03He sees himself as a historic figure, carrying on at least the legacy of the czars.
53:09The oligarchs' ability to straddle the fence, enjoying the best of both worlds, is over.
53:15In the words of a Russian proverb, there's no escape from fate.
53:22There are never happy endings to Russian stories.
53:26There's not going to be happy endings for most of the Russian oligarchs.
53:31It's a terrible dog-eat-dog-a-roll to get where they got.
53:36And it's kind of hard to see happy endings for most of these people.
53:40music
53:50music
53:58music
54:03Legenda Adriana Zanotto
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