High life | 25 October 2008

New York

‘Oligarchs brace for a downturn,’ screams a New York business headline, a fact that sends me rushing to buy hankies, now selling at a premium at every corner store. Bloomberg News calculates that the richest 25 Russians on the Forbes list have lost a collective $230 billion since last March. Which means that these 25 have lost more than four times Warren Buffet’s total wealth. It’s very good news, unless you’re selling private jets, superyachts, are a hooker or a pimp, sell gaudy jewellery or own a nightclub. Actually, it couldn’t happen to nicer guys, not that they’re exactly down and out. Apparently, the worst hit is Oleg Deripaska, a Cheeta lookalike without the chimp’s charm and good manners, whose two great buddies in the UK are none other than Jacob and Nat Rothschild, now nervously not answering their mobiles in case Oleg needs cash.

Deripaska muscled his way into RussNeft, a giant private oil company. He had his US visa revoked last year and the wily Rothschild friend sticks to countries such as Israel, Montenegro and, of course, good old Britain. His lookalike fellow Russian, Roman — dead-eyes — Abramovich, has declared that the downturn doesn’t affect him, but he’s whistling in the wind. He, too, is looking for ‘alternative sources of financing’ because he did, after all, build his empire with debt.

But Abramovich is in with Putin, which for the moment makes him safe to play the arts patron and sports fan, two things this bum knows absolutely nothing about. Mind you, these creeps have stashed enough moolah away to keep them in the pink for the next 300 years, but the latest sign of financial distress among the oligarchs is that they’ve taken to using their cash to help bail out unrelated personal projects.