Anti-Putin Oligarch Berezovsky Buried in Surrey… He was a Suicide

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After the burial of Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, found dead at his house near London, was over, the mourners began leaving Brookwood Cemetery. One of the witnesses said, “The guests are leaving, no one’s talking to reporters”. According to sources, a memorial service preceded the burial. On 8 May, Berezovsky’s funeral, took place at Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey. However, his will, drawn up just nine days before his death, left more questions than answers.

Berezovsky always intended his funeral to be a private affair, closed to the media. Very few of his friends attended the service. Surrey Police confirmed to VOR that they’d be attending a funeral at Brookwood (near Guildford) to prevent any hindrance to the proceedings, although they refused to say if it was for Berezovsky. However, they denied reports that armed police were in the area. Thames Valley Police, which is leading the investigation into his death, wouldn’t confirm funeral arrangements, saying it was a private affair. The few mourners included his friend Akhmed Zakayev and members of his legal team. According to a tweet from journalist Luke Harding of The Guardian, there were fewer than 30 people at the cemetery in Surrey. He also reported that a Ukrainian TV crew hid in the bushes.

The self-made billionaire… said to be worth 3 billion USD (93.5 billion Roubles. 2.28 billion Euros. 1.93 billion UK Pounds)… was a former academic who built his fortune with investments in oil, cars, aluminium, and the media. He played an integral part in Vladimir Putin’s rise to power in 2000. However, they fell out when Putin began charging many oligarchs with tax evasion. Berezovsky fled to England in 2000, where he lived until his death. The Times reported that although he’d recently changed his will, his executors refused to carry it out and a court appointed an accountancy firm to deal with his finances, said to be in some disarray.

Friends of Boris Berezovsky claimed that someone strangled him to death, despite a post-mortem examination that showed no sign of a struggle, and that he died with a ligature around his neck consistent with hanging. He was found dead in his bathroom at his mansion in Mill Lane, Ascot, west of London on Saturday 23 March. Nevertheless, friends say that he wasn’t suicidal; they believe that someone strangled him. Reports circulated that he was due to be cremated at Gunnersbury Cemetery on 6 May. However, being a municipal cemetery, that seemed unlikely as it was a bank holiday in the UK. The inquest opened and adjourned on 28 March 28, after which the police released a brief statement in which a spokesman confirmed, “The results of the post-mortem examination, carried out by a Home Office pathologist, found the cause of death is consistent with hanging. The pathologist found nothing to indicate a violent struggle”.

8 May 2013

Voice of Russia World Service

http://english.ruvr.ru/2013_05_08/Russian-businessman-Boris-Berezovsky-buried-in-Surrey/

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On Wednesday, Russian-born oligarch Boris Berezovsky, who died at his home near London in March, was laid to rest at the Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey in the UK. An eyewitness told RIA-Novosti, “The guests are leaving; they’re reluctant to talk to journalists”. About 60 people were present, including Berezovsky’s close friend Chechen separatist leader Akhmed Zakayev, along with the deceased oligarch’s three ex-wives and his daughter Yelizaveta. Journalists weren’t allowed at the funeral, the date and location of which were kept secret to keep the media away. According to eyewitnesses, the casket remained closed during the ceremony. The 67-year-old self-exiled tycoon was found dead in the bathroom of his home in Ascot in southern England on March 23. The official cause of death hasn’t yet been announced, but a post-mortem examination found that the death was consistent with hanging.

8 May 2013

RIA-Novosti

http://en.rian.ru/world/20130508/181038322/Self-Exiled-Russian-Businessman-Berezovsky-Buried-in-UK.html

Ken Livingstone: “It’s a Tragedy Mrs Thatcher Ever Came to Power”

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Former London Mayor Ken Livingstone was a fierce critic of Mrs Thatcher when she was in power. The British media gave him the moniker “Red Ken” for his socialist beliefs during her tenure. Thatcher viewed the Greater London Council, of which Livingstone was leader, as a political threat and a waste of money. In 1986, Thatcher’s government abolished the GLC, putting Livingstone out of a job.

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There are two things to say about Mrs Thatcher. Unlike most politicians, who’re spineless, who never want to actually lead, and who wait to see where public opinion’s going, she had beliefs that almost no one in her cabinet actually shared at the time she became the leader of the Tory Conservative Party. However, she ignored them, she drove ahead, and she made the changes that she believed that Britain needed… you have to respect that. I can’t think of any other modern Prime Minister with that degree of self-confidence and courage in their beliefs.

The tragedy for Britain is that almost everything she believed in was wrong, and almost all the problems that assail us today are the legacy of her neoliberal economics… the high unemployment, the collapse of our manufacturing industry. She inherited a nation that had some problems, but she made them infinitely worse… she deregulated the banking industry, she decided to write off our industry, she wouldn’t build good homes for ordinary people to rent, and she’s left a terrible legacy that’ll take a generation to clear up.

She did terrible things, such as abolishing the Greater London Council because she didn’t agree with it; it was the first real rolling back of democracy in a hundred years of British history. It’s very hard to think of anyone in a modern democracy who’d do something like that. The US President always has state governors and mayors critical of their policy, it’d never occur to them to do away with them. That meant terrible problems for London; we had a decade-and-a-half with no leadership. We actually proposed that we should stop discriminating against black people and against homosexuals; we recognised that women had equal rights… hardly insane, but just a bit ahead of its time.

Clearly, [the state funeral] isn’t right. The only politician of my lifetime that had a state funeral was Winston Churchill, who was a decisive force in the defeat of Adolf Hitler. If we’re to think about anyone today, it should be those whose lives she destroyed. We used to have a sound manufacturing industry; she wiped it out. Look at people’s lives… our suicide rates have gone up since the financial crisis; the bankers abused all the freedom that she gave them. We had a country used to virtually full employment before she got in… ever since, we’ve had people and whole communities just written off.

Overwhelmingly, it’s a tragedy Mrs Thatcher ever came to power. I respect the courage of her convictions and the way she led; the tragedy is she led us in the wrong direction.

9 April 2013

Ken Livingstone

Voice of Russia World Service

http://english.ruvr.ru/2013_04_09/Its-a-tragedy-Mrs-Thatcher-ever-came-to-power-Ken-Livingstone-211/

Media Reports State that Berezovsky’s Burial Will be in England

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Dozhd TV, citing family sources, stated that the funeral of Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, who died in late March in the UK, would be in London at the end of the forensic investigation. A presenter on Dozhd confirmed that their “source” “attested that Berezovsky’s adopted children, especially, his older daughters Elizabeth and Catherine, took the decision to hold his funeral in England“. Dozhd reported that Berezovsky’s burial would be in Gunnersbury Cemetery, which is also the gravesite of philosopher Aleksandr Piatigorsky, who was a friend of Berezovsky’s. The date of the burial is still unsettled. For the last decade, most of Berezovsky’s family have lived in the West, so, there was some hesitation in regards to a burial in Russia.

His staff found Berezovsky’s body on 23 March, locked in a bathroom in his house in Ascot (Berkshire). Earlier this week, authorities announced the preliminary results of the autopsy on Berezovsky’s body. According to the report, the cause of death could be hanging. The Home Office will announce the official cause of death in a few weeks, after it conducts more research. Earlier reports said that one of the versions of the incident under consideration is suicide. Berezovsky recently experienced financial difficulties, including in a loss of a lawsuit to Roman Abramovich , whom he had to pay about 35 million UK Pounds (1.66 billion Roubles. 53.2 million USD. 41.4 million Euros) in damages .

Berezovsky in a recent interview: I don’t see the point of life >>

The life of Boris Berezovsky at a Glance >>

Ideological Dead>>

Berezovsky Expected a 300 million windfall>>

Zhirinovsky Thinks Berezovsky Murdered>>

1 April 2013

RIA-Novosti

http://ria.ru/world/20130401/930473008.html

Boris Berezovky: Game Over

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I arrived in Russia in 1997, when Boris Berezovsky’s influence was at its height. The year before, he had managed to get Boris Yeltsin re-elected, and we needn’t think too hard about how or why he achieved that. In those days, Berezovsky was often in Chechnya, and I couldn’t keep up with how much stuff he owned. Then Putin became president, and shortly afterwards the “Godfather of the Kremlin” was out. Sometime later I read a vehemently anti-Putin editorial in a major British newspaper, before such things were commonplace. “Who wrote this?“ I wondered. Then, I saw the by-line:

Boris Berezovsky

I was stunned. Hadn’t the editor done a quick web search before paying this “Russian businessman” to write his screed? Evidently, not, although I now understand that serial failure to grasp that not every opponent of Putin is a brave Solzhenitsyn is characteristic of the media in the UK and USA. Last year, for instance, I watched a documentary on Khodorkovsky, and the filmmaker was baffled when Russians expressed contempt for the fallen billionaire. As for Berezovsky, for years I wrote him off as an embittered crook until I read an interesting piece by Eduard Limonov, written in his trademark broken English. The author-turned-opposition leader was recalling a very expensive bottle of cognac the exiled billionaire had sent him upon his release from prison on weapons smuggling charges in 2003:

I like Berezovsky more and more. Exiled, he looks noble. Berezovsky is a type of anxious, never-satisfied life-eater, of warrior, the person who lives by the energy of conflict. Abroad, in Great Britain, he’s forced to exist without conflict, in order to preserve himself from a Russian prison. He wants badly to go out of that golden cage of London, again go to exciting life of conflicts in Russia. He isn’t interested in money. Money is only fuel to his conflicts.

(Full Limonov text)

A life-eater, fuelled by the energy of conflict! That also describes Limonov, who used to ramble on about legalising polygamy and teaching kids to use flame-throwers (before he became a semi-respectable Putin opponent in the eyes of David Frost et al). In Berezovsky, he recognised some of his own characteristics. Now, I saw the oligarch differently. He was a game-player, a man who delighted in his cleverness, in danger, and who exulted in the provocations he staged before the global media.

I recall footage I saw of Berezovsky talking to a group of Russophile English aristocrats about Putin. With what pleasure… and ease… he seduced these political naifs, who were blind to the conspiratorial nature of Russian power. Even better was when he befriended George Bush’s hapless wee brother Neil, who in the mid-2000s was trying to sell a video projector he called “The Cow” as an educational tool to developing countries who didn’t know any better. Berezovsky got involved and made a few introductions in the former USSR, even accompanying the mini-Bush on a visit to Latvia. Putin was outraged; Berezovsky was delighted; Bush never sold his rubbish toy.

Berezovsky’s influence in exile reached its peak with the murder of his employee Aleksandr Litvinenko. Suddenly, the renegade oligarch was at the centre of the world’s attention, wreaking havoc upon Putin’s reputation. However, this is also when journalists started looking seriously into the career of the life-eater, and his reputation never recovered either, for the “heroic dissident” was clearly a man enmeshed in plots, scandal, crime, and death. Of course, Berezovsky was an exceedingly clever man. Long before he was a car dealer, he was a mathematician and a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Nevertheless, this was his problem. His attitude was that of someone who’d always considered himself the smartest man in the room. Now, when the other man in the room was Yeltsin, that may have been true… but then again, the table at which Yeltsin sat also had more brains than the Russian president did.

Yeltsin, it is clear, was too easy to manipulate… because, after that, Berezovsky serially underestimated his foes. Having backed the mid-level ex-KGB officer Putin as successor, he was astounded when Putin drove him into exile. He also underestimated his protégé Roman Abramovich, and this is where his intelligence really started to undermine him. You don’t need to be a lawyer to know that Berezovsky’s claim that Abramovich bullied him into giving up his stake in Sibneft sounded feeble. Indeed, the case was so tenuous that Berezovsky must have used a lot of intellectual energy to persuade himself of his own arguments.

The results were disastrous, and with the evaporation of his money and influence, Berezovsky could see that the game was finally up. Then again, maybe not… when Putin’s spokesman claimed that Berezovsky sent his foe a handwritten letter pleading for the right to return to Russia, I was sceptical. All exiles yearn for home, but did Berezovsky really think that he could sweet-talk Putin? Then I remembered his arrogance, his hubris, and wondered if he hadn’t persuaded himself he could use his cleverness to pull off one last great act of gamesmanship…

Then, it would seem, he hanged himself.

27 March 2013

Daniel Kalder

RIA-Novosti

http://en.rian.ru/columnists/20130327/180278553/Transmissions-from-a-Lone-Star-Boris-Berezovky-Game-Over.html