Dead Georgian Billionaire
February 14th, 2008Any guesses about what’s really going on here? I have absolutely no idea.
For example, what is the nature of the relationship between mobsters from the former Soviet Union and British elites?
Via: Times Online:
He feared death would come through a sabotaged flight or a bloodbath of his bodyguards but it was in a bedroom at his Home Counties manor house that Badri Patarkatsishvili met his end.
Whether the Georgian oligarch and opposition leader died naturally of a heart attack or from foul play is now for British detectives to determine.
They tested for radioactivity yesterday but found none.
“Badri”, as he was known, spent his final day in the company of Lord Goldsmith, the former Attorney-General; Lord Bell, Margaret Thatcher’s PR man; and a handful of Russian exiles. There was no security man in Lord Goldsmith’s offices and the Georgian seemed far from paranoid.
…
Since late last year Mr Patarkatsishvili, protected by 120 bodyguards, had been saying that he feared he would be assassinated in London by the Georgian authorities. In December he said he had been the target of at least two assassination attempts in Britain. The Georgian authorities had accused him of plotting a coup.
A covertly recorded audiotape purporting to be a conversation between a Chechen hitman and an official from the Georgian Interior Ministry was played in December to The Sunday Times. The voices suggested killing the Georgian in England or arranging for a helicopter or aircraft crash. “Even if he had 100 people guarding him, well that’s not a problem,” the official is heard to say. “Our issue is such that we’ll destroy these guards.”
There was every reason for Mr Patarkatsishvili to be frightened. His friend and colleague Alexander Litvinenko had been murdered in London in a suspected Russian poison plot using radioactive polonium-210. The Georgian had even sheltered the dissident former KGB man as he fled from President Putin’s clutches.
The web does not end there. The suspect wanted by Britain to be tried for murdering Mr Litvinenko is a former employee of Mr Patarkatsishvili and Mr Berezovsky. Andrei Lugovoy was security chief at their television station.
Mr Lugovoy, who denies anything to do with the poisoning, has a further link to Mr Patarkatsishvili’s final hours. Mr Lugovoy was jailed in 2001 for a failed attempt to free Nikolai Glushkov, the deputy director of Aeroflot, who was being held for alleged fraud. Mr Patarkatsishvili was accused by Russia of plotting that foiled escape. And who did the Georgian spend four hours with in Lord Goldsmith’s office on Tuesday? Mr Glushkov, now safely in London.
Plots, real and imagined, are all too easy to spot in the world of spies, politicians, financiers and gangsters into which the old Soviet Union descended. Mr Patarkatsishvili was far from above suspicion. He was regarded as little better than a mobster by General Aleksandr Korzhakov, former head of the Russian Presidential Security Service. “Badri”, Boris Yeltsin’s one-time bodyguard told the author Paul Klebnikov for his book Godfather of the Kremlin, “has an alias, like any gangster. In the criminal underworld he is known as ‘Badar’.” Klebnikov claimed that police sources saw Mr Patarkatsishvili as a go-between to Russian organised crime groups. The writer is unavailable for comment — he was shot four times as he left work as editor of Forbes Russia in Moscow in 2004.
Mr Patarkatsishvili was a business associate of Mr Berezovsky and Roman Abramovich, the Chelsea Football Club owner. The clique were said to be behind the choice of Vladimir Putin as president. When Mr Putin turned on Mr Berezovsky, Mr Patarkatsishvili stuck with his business partner and Mr Abramovich chose the Kremlin.
Recently Mr Patarkatsishvili’s prominent financing of the opposition to Georgia’s pro-Western leadership, even standing as a candidate in last month’s presidential election, is said to have pleased Russia.
The Georgian oligarch’s final day of business began with a prolonged meeting with Lord Goldsmith. The former Labour politician had been advising him on numerous disputes with the Georgian authorities over assets and withdrawal of licences. Also present were Mr Glushkov and Yuli Dubov, wanted for fraud in Russia but given asylum by Britain. After four hours of private talks, they were joined by Mr Berezovsky and his PR man, Lord Bell, for another two-hour session.
Mr Patarkatsiskvili was said by Lord Bell to have left the room to get some fresh air but seemed fine and full of energy when he returned. The Georgian then joined Mr Berezovsky at his Mayfair offices and, at 7pm, took his chauffeur-driven limousine home to his home, Downside Manor, near Leatherhead, Surrey.
It is unclear whether the family had their servants prepare a meal or sent out for a takeaway, but after eating, Mr Patarkatsishvili, worth an estimated £6 billion, went upstairs and collapsed in his bedroom. His wife and children called an ambulance.
Mr Berezovsky was woken at 3am to learn that another of his friends had died. He rushed to the manor but police had secured the windows and doors to preserve it as a crime scene and the Russian was refused entry.
Surrey Police said that the death was being treated as suspicious but a source said this was because it was sudden. Mr Berezovsky issued a statement: “The death of Badri Patarkatsishvili is a terrible tragedy. I have lost my closest friend.”
You happen to touch two of my favourite subjects in two days. I just moved out of Russia after 7 exciting years of working and traveling throughout the former Soviet Union, including such exotic countries as Kazakhstan, Kyrgistan, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Armenia. So I consider myself somewhat an expert on this topic.
The funny thing is that sometimes you have to move away from home to be able to look at it from the outside. In Russia I realized that there actually is no real difference between aristocrats, business leaders, political leaders and criminal leaders. At least not on a strategic level (maybe so on an operational level). By the way, this has always been the case: the nobility of today were the king’s strongmen of the middle-ages.
I met a lot of those guys during the years, who were working on the edge of business, politics and crime. One thing which particularly impressed me is one guy who told me that they (=Russian ruling elite) didn’t care about Bush & Co, that there were contacts with the Americans at the highest level, that they were working together to a certain extent, and that anti-globalists were the real enemies. No kidding. It took me a few years to grasp the real meaning of this statement; it has always intrigued me.
So, what is going on here – forgive me the oversimplification – is a clash between elites. Putin’s team is the FSB (former KGB); they are the ones who were in power before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Berezovksy, Khodorkovsky, etc are the CIA, they are the ones who tried to break up the country and its assets in pieces, divide & conquer and enjoy the fruits of massive natural resources (which they partly succeeded in, and which Putin is trying to roll back).
Khodorkovsky was meddling in politics, and then decided to sell 25% of Yukos to Exxon; within 3 weeks after announcing this he was in jail (and is there to stay). Berezovksy stole a few billion and had to flee the country because he was challenging Putin’s power. He is in exile, would love his power back and has a few billion in his bank account; which makes him a natural ally of the British/US/Jewish elite (by the way, it didn’t escape the attention of the Russian people that of the 8 most powerful people, the oligarch’s, at the end of the 90s 7 were jewish).
The balance of power in Russia is very complex and fragile, with many power groups based on region and ethnicity, constantly jockying for position and having limited loyalty to anyone but themselves. So to put it simply: there are Russian mobster groups (in the widest sense of the word) that are pro-Putin and those that are anti-Putin. The latter ones are drinking tea with British aristocrats.
Do I make sense?
The following websites regularly have good analysis on Russia:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=region®ionId=6
http://www.atimes.com/
http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net/index.html
http://www.onlinejournal.com/
Excellent analysis es. I believe it was Crytogon where I read a while back that when Khodorkovsky was arrested and Putin went to sieze Yukos assets, a secret ownership agreement came to light showing that the Rothschild empire was using him as a front. I would think from an anti-globalist perspective, the repatriation of as many of the oligarch’s ill-gotten gains as possible is a worthy endeavor for Putin. Maybe from the same perspective, the same could be said for extending the Russian nuclear shield over the West Bank and Gaza.
ES, I do sincerely hope that you’ll be visiting and posting commentary like the above as often as you see fit. It is most illuminating.
As I read the text of the article about Badri, I was also struck by a memory — of reading Roman history. Recollecting the long string of imperial rulers whose frequent replacement was more ofthen than not via less-than-natural means like fratricide and all those other nasty -cide’s, like matri- and patri-…
Yes, indeedy, es — much obliged for your insightful comments.
Ya can’t bitch about this blog, eh? A brilliant *and* hooty webmaster, and then among the almost obligatory fruitcake comments (and I’m not excluding myself from that categorization) we get these readers who have their sensitive fingers on some very interesting pulses and are willing to clue in the rest of us. Woot.
Kevin asks – “For example, what is the nature of the relationship between mobsters from the former Soviet Union and British elites?”
Well, what a surprise, Badri Patarkatsishvili was Jewish. Could it be entirely coincidental that most of these people are Jewish. Most of the Russian mobsters/oligarchs, and most of the behind-the-scenes orchestrators of British politics, such as “Lord” Goldsmith, and the various Friends of Israel groups which are attached to all the main political parties.
Of course this is never mentioned in the British media. And who owns most of that ?
Thanks, ES. The post Soviet era has been an orgy of looting, murder, corruption and all the rest of it. Has a decent history of this period been written yet? Specifically, one that describes the factions’ connections to the West?
Kevin,
Not that I know of, but I have to admit I never really looked for it. I have read some books on Russian oligarchs in the past, but they missed a few key points to my opinion; most of my knowledge is personal experience/mouth-to-mouth. Of course, journalists in Russia are not actually encouraged to dig into these matters (just google Politikovskaya). However, I have tried to dig up some articles for you which can provide an overall view on what’s going on in Russia, and between Russia and the West. Hope you’ll find them useful.
The article to start with, just to get introduced to the main players, is:
http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=8575&IBLOCK_ID=35
A good piece on the looting of Russia:
http://www.demokratizatsiya.org/Dem%20Archives/DEM%2006-04%20bivens.pdf
Then, in no particular order:
http://www.onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_2222.shtml
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=LAU20041025&articleId=556
http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net/Geopolitics___Eurasia/Russian_Giant/russian_giant.html
http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net/Geopolitics___Eurasia/Putin/putin.html
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=599
Let me finish with some key hypotheses:
– Russia is extremely resource rich and considering its size and its nuclear arsenal it is a power to take into account. Especially important is the Caspian Sea area where vast amounts of oil are presumed to sit untapped in the ground; a lot of what is happening in this region has to do with how this oil will reach the market.
– The US drew the Russians into the Afghan war, armed and financed the Afghans and then through Saudi Arabia engineered the oil price to record lows at the moment Russia’s oil production peaked. Result: total systemic failure.
– The plan from the start was to break up the Soviet empire into pieces and to control its resources.
– The fact that revolutions took place simultaneously all over the world can not be considered a coincidence. At the moment the Soviet Union was in turmoil the world’s power balance shifted rapidly. This includes the break up of Yugoslavia, which was engineered through the IMF/World Bank.
– The US had major influence on Russian policy through Chubais/Gaidar; many Russian local leaders did not object to privatisation as fortunes were to be made.
– By the end of the 90s the country was largely looted and the cards had been largely shuffled and some factions of the FSB (former KGB) decided to take back Russian power. The oligarchs were informed that as long as they didn’t meddle with politics, they could keep their lootings.
– Some did, and shifted their loyalty to the newly established power group, let’s call them ‘Putin’s team’. Others stayed loyal to the US, or let’s call them more correctly ‘foreign interests’. They are now either in exile or in jail.
– The Chechen war is about oil-transport routes from the Caspian to the West. And about breaking up the Russian Federation. Putin’s team has ‘pacified’ Chechnya. Any terrorist acts by Chechens and related groups, such as the Ost-theatre hijacking and the Beslan school hijacking, can be seen as separatist agenda engineered and sponsored by ‘foreign interests’.
– The revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia should be seen in the context of dismantling Soviet power structures and expanding NATO.
– As you might recall last year a highly placed Russian central bank official was shot. He was known as a crime-fighter cracking down on money laundring banks. ‘Crime fighting’ in this kind of context usually means ‘cornering the market’. (same as the ‘war on drugs’ is about maintaining the drug trade monopoly) So this murder was about who controls the banking system. If anyone knows the answer to that question, I’m prepared to pay large amounts of cash to satisfy my curiosity.
– Whenever you hear Khodorkovsky, remember he is a Rothchild-guy. Whoever is friends with Berezovsky, is an enemy of Putin’s Russia. When you hear Abramovich, think of the ultimate tightrope walker, with good ties to both worlds. All those guys are jewish by the way.
Anyhow, keep in mind, history is about elites controlling the masses. Nation states are vehicles for elites to further their agenda. Although elites within and among nation-states fight eachother all the time, they will join forces when it comes to controlling the masses. So don’t get your hopes up for Putin’s team. Orwell’s 1984 is going to happen no matter what (or is happening, or has already happened depending on where you live and what your perspective is); those guys are just fighting who can play big brother in that part of the world.