Berezovsky, Boris Abramovich (1958– )

Russian billionaire businessman, one of the so-called ‘oligarchs’ who held much of the country's wealth during Boris Yeltsin's presidency 1991–99 and had considerable political influence. He assisted the rise to power of Yeltsin's successor, Vladimir Putin, but lost favour when Putin sought to curb the influence of the country's oligarchs. He left Russia for self-imposed exile in the UK in 2000. A declared enemy of Putin, in 2001 he was charged with fraud and corruption by Russian courts and has been subject to a succession of assassination attempts.

In the latter stages of Boris Yeltsin's presidency, the government came to be seen as dominated by ‘oligarchs’ – financier industrialists who quickly amassed large fortunes after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the sale of state assets at low prices. A former mathematician, he made his first fortune from importing Mercedes cars into Russia for the elite from the late 1980s. He extended his business interests into media, airlines, oil (Sibneft), and banking. His closeness to Yeltsin through his powerful daughter, Tatyana Dyachenko, was such that in the mid 1990s he was seen as more powerful than any minister or adviser. He survived an assassination attempt in 1994 and was persistently rumoured to be connected with the murder of Vladimir Listiev, head of the state television service ORT, but his power remained such that Yeltsin appointed him deputy head of the National Security Council and then, in 1998, deputy secretary of the Commonwealth of Independent States, a role that allowed him to deepen his links with the leaders of the post-Soviet republics and to further his business interests.

Chief among those who pumped some $150 million into Yeltsin's re-election campaign in 1996, he then swung away from the ailing president to back the governor of Krasnoyarsk, Alexander Lebed and, initially, Vladimir Putin, in 1999.