Boris Berezovsky

Who was Boris Berezovsky?

Boris Abramovich Berezovsky was a Russian business oligarch, government official and mathematician. He was a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. An opponent of Vladimir Putin, Berezovsky clashed with the new president soon after his election in 2000 and was a vocal critic for the remainder of his life. In late 2000, after the Russian Deputy Prosecutor General demanded that Berezovsky appear for questioning, he did not return from abroad and moved to the UK, which granted him political asylum in 2003. In Russia he was later convicted in absentia of fraud and embezzlement. Russia repeatedly failed to obtain the extradition of Berezovsky from Britain, which became a major point of diplomatic tension between the two countries.

Berezovsky made his fortune in Russia in the 1990s when the country went through privatization of state property He profited from gaining control over various assets, including the country's main television channel, Channel One. In 1997 Forbes magazine estimated Berezovsky's wealth at US$3 billion. He was at the height of his power in the later Yeltsin years, when he was deputy secretary of Russia's security council, a friend of Boris Yeltsin's influential daughter Tatyana, and a member of the Yeltsin "family". Berezovsky helped fund Unity – the political party, which formed Vladimir Putin's parliamentary base, and was elected to the Duma on Putin's slate. However, following the Russian presidential election in March 2000, Berezovsky went into opposition and resigned from the Duma. After he moved to Britain, the government took over his television assets, and he divested from other Russian holdings.