Sergei Pugachev: 'Putin's banker' now lives in fear of man he put into power
Exclusive: Former billionaire gives first interview since fleeing Britain about alleged death threats, being on the run and the man he helped get elected
Tye Gaurdian:
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.
WNU Editor: He is in trouble because his greed knew no bounds .... even by Russian standards. From being an adviser to former Russian president Boris Yeltsin (1996) and living on a government salary to becoming a billionaire worth $15 billion with assets that include two major shipyards, the world’s biggest mine and significant real estate in Moscow and St Petersburg .... and all within a decade .... his claims that he did it legitimately stretches the imagination (and beyond). Putin and his policies are a problem .... but people like Sergei Pugachev are also a problem .... and his crying that he now only has $70 million to survive does not impress me one bit especially since Russian prosecutors are estimating that billions were stolen by him and his cronies and transferred out of the country.
Pretty much, the truth is that Putin and Pugachev and Khodarkovsky and all the rest of them are all members of the same new elite that has some internal quarrels and sometimes finds it convenient to appeal to the Russian people or to liberal sentiment or to foreigners in the process of resolving those quarrels. They're all bandits, and all worthy of each other.
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