Cover Story

Oiling up to the oligarchs

8 October 2005

Dominic Midgley on how Britain’s service industries are busy separating London’s free-spending New Russians from their cash

The trappings of wealth in the bag, issues of manners, style and class have to be considered. This is good news for the country’s beleaguered public schools. One Russian remarks, ‘People would rather say, “My son is studying at an English public school” than say, “I own a Porsche.”’ Millfield, once described by unkind critics as the ‘double cream school’ on the grounds that its pupils were ‘thick and rich’, has done particularly well in attracting the oligarchs’ young. London-based Tatyana Dyachenko, Yeltsin’s unfeasibly wealthy daughter, and her third husband Valentin Yumashev, the man who penned her father’s memoirs before becoming a senior Kremlin aide, have sent their son Gleb to Millfield. Meanwhile Yumashev’s daughter Polina, who attended Millfield as a girl, is now married to RusAl’s Deripaska.

Like their parents, the oligarchs’ children have learnt to live with levels of security that border on the paranoid. No one is more careful in this area than Berezovsky, who narrowly escaped death in Moscow in 1994 when a remote-controlled car bomb decapitated his driver. On at least one occasion he has hired six identical limousines, which passed through the gates of his house in Egham, split into three pairs and headed off in different directions to confuse would-be tails. In addition to the fleets of cars with blacked-out windows, all the oligarchs hire teams of bodyguards, many of them provided by Kroll Associates, the leading name in international security.

There can be a downside to dealing with the New Russians, however, as the Rolls-Royce dealership in Berkeley Square discovered after taking delivery of a customised Phantom V in December last year. The customer, a minor oligarch called Alex Kirzhnev, had paid a £70,000 deposit on a car priced at £210,000 and had ordered £85,000 of extras, including extra-large wheels and armchair seats in the back. While the Rolls-Royce salesmen were making increasingly anxious calls to staff at his Home Counties mansion earlier this year, their esteemed customer was locked in a Moscow jail, having been arrested for attempting to bribe a government official with a £60,000 Mercedes saloon.

Dominic Midgley is co-author of Abramovich: the Billionaire from Nowhere (HarperCollins) and associate editor of City AM.