Sergei Pugachev: 'Putin's banker' now lives in fear of man he put into power
Exclusive: Former billionaire gives first interview since fleeing Britain about alleged death threats, being on the run and the man he helped get elected
Tye Gaurdian:
Sergei Pugachev doesn’t look like a man on the run. He is in good humour, dressed in jeans and a casual shirt. But the former Russian banker – once close to Vladimir Putin, and now his bitter opponent – is elusive about how he recently escaped from London to France.
“I can’t go into details. I didn’t swim the English channel,” he says, speaking from his new location in Nice on the Côte D’Azur. “It was all absolutely legal,” he adds.
Pugachev is embroiled in a battle with the Russian state, in which he was once a privileged insider. In 2011, he left Russia and settled largely in London, with his British partner Alexandra Tolstoy and their three small children.
WNU Editor: He is in trouble because his greed knew no bounds .... even by Russian standards. From being an adviser to former Russian president Boris Yeltsin (1996) and living on a government salary to becoming a billionaire worth $15 billion with assets that include two major shipyards, the world’s biggest mine and significant real estate in Moscow and St Petersburg .... and all within a decade .... his claims that he did it legitimately stretches the imagination (and beyond). Putin and his policies are a problem .... but people like Sergei Pugachev are also a problem .... and his crying that he now only has $70 million to survive does not impress me one bit especially since Russian prosecutors are estimating that billions were stolen by him and his cronies and transferred out of the country.
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