Boris Berezovsky

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This article is about Boris Berezovsky the Russian businessman, and not Boris Berezovsky the pianist.

Boris Abramovich Berezovsky (Бори́с Абра́мович Березо́вский) (born January 23, 1946) (Note: Boris Berezovsky is now officially known as Platon Elenin by the British Home Office [1]) is a Russian businessman. He was Russia's first billionaire.

Berezovsky was born to a Jewish family in Moscow. He studied forestry and then applied mathematics, receiving his doctorate in 1983 and becoming a Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1991 and a chair of a laboratory in the RAS Institute of Control Problems (Институт Проблем Управления).

Berezovsky started in business in 1989 under perestroika by buying and reselling automobiles from state manufacturer AutoVAZ. Officially, Berezovsky was called upon as an expert in development of optimized system of management of the enterprise. In 1992 a new middleman company "LogoVAZ" was created with Berezovsky being its president. LogoVAZ became an exclusive consignment dealer of AutoVAZ.

During the lawlessness of the early 1990s Berezovsky, like many businessmen, was targeted by the Russian mafia for extortion, allegedly because of connections Berezovsky had with the Chechen mafia powerful in Moscow at that time. He survived several assassination attempts, including a 1994 car bomb attack. During the presidency of Boris Yeltsin, Berezovsky was one of the businessmen who gained access to the president. He used his political connections to acquire stakes in state companies including AutoVAZ itself, state airline Aeroflot, and several oil properties that he organized into Sibneft, paying a fraction of the companies' book values. Berezovsky organized a bank to finance his operations and acquired several news media holdings as well. These media provided essential support for Yeltsin's reelection in 1996.

Berezovsky is a leading proponent of political and economic liberalization in Russia. For this reason he has frequently entered into politics by investing in liberal media, financing liberal candidates, making political statements, and even seeking office himself. He was briefly secretary-general of the Commonwealth of Independent States and later a member of the Duma. He strongly opposed the Second Chechen War but nonetheless supported Vladimir Putin's 2000 presidential campaign. Putin did not welcome Berezovsky's views on Chechnya or his political clout and opened investigations into Berezovsky's business activities. Fearing arrest, Berezovsky escaped to London, where he was granted political asylum. Putin's government successfully pressured Berezovsky to sell many of his business holdings. He has been charged with fraud and political corruption, but the Russian government has not been able to extradite him. He has strongly criticised the current Russian administration and believes that Putin could stage a coup d'etat rather than leave office in 2009 as the constitution requires.

Berezovsky's image among Russians is generally poor; many consider him the most unlawful and unethical of the oligarchs and blame him especially for the country's economic collapse. They believe that he, like other oligarchs, defrauded the government through Yeltsin's privatization program. Berezovsky maintains that he acted within the legal framework of the time, and that the privatization bidding was closed to prevent corruption rather than to allow it. A 1996 Forbes magazine article titled "Godfather of the Kremlin?", by Paul Klebnikov, portrayed Berezovsky as a mafia boss who had his rivals murdered. Berezovsky sued the magazine for libel, and the dispute was ultimately settled with the magazine retracting both claims. Klebnikov expanded the article into a book, Godfather of the Kremlin, that Berezovsky did not contest in court. Klebnikov subsequently became the editor of the Russian edition of Forbes and was murdered in Moscow on July 9, 2004.

In 2003 Boris Berezovsky formally changed his name to Platon Elenin ("Platon" being Russian for Plato, and Elena is the name of his wife) in the British courts. No reason has been given - but Platon is the name of the lead character in a film Tycoon based on his life. In December 2003 he was allowed to travel under his new name to Georgia, which provoked a row between Russia and Georgia.

In September 2005, soon after Ukrainian government led by the prime-minister Yulia Tymoshenko was dismissed by the president Viktor Yushchenko, former president of Ukraine Leonid Kravchuk has accused Berezovsky of financing Yushchenko's presidential election campaign, and provided copies of documents showing money transfers from companies he said are controlled by Berezovsky to companies controlled by Yuschenko's official backers. Berezovsky has confirmed that he met Yushchenko's representatives in London before the election, and that the money was transferred from his companies, but he refused to confirm or deny that the companies that received the money were used in Yushchenko's campaign. Financing of election campaigns by foreign citizens is illegal in Ukraine and might potentially lead to Yushchenko's impeachment.[2].

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