At long last the Hate List returns... and in at No. 2 is that lovely Russian crook who owns Chelsea FC.
The following was taken from Wikipedia:
"Abramovich started his commercial activity in the late 1980s when Soviet president
Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms permitted the opening of small private businesses, known as co-operatives. In 1992 to 1995 Abramovich founded five companies that conducted resale and acted as intermediaries, eventually specializing in the trading of oil and oil products. In
1995 Roman Abramovich, together with
Boris Berezovsky, acquired the controlling interest in the large oil company
Sibneft. The deal was within the controversial
Loans-for-shares program and cost the partners $100m, although the real cost of the company was in billions of dollars
[3].
During the
1990s, through their holding company Millhouse Capital, Abramovich and his business partner
Eugene Shvidler acquired significant stakes in Russia's largest air company
Aeroflot and the aluminium giant
Rusal, as well as in smaller companies in the automobile industry, pharmaceuticals, food processing, real estate and other sectors. Most of those assets were sold for hefty profits in
2002-
2005. Most notably, Millhouse Capital sold its stake in
Sibneft to state energy giant
Gazprom for 13 billion dollars, and its stake in
Rusal to
Oleg Deripaska for 2 billion dollars.
In 2004, Swiss criminal investigators abandoned an investigation into an alleged fraud involving a $4.8 billion loan from the
IMF to Russia, in which Abramovich was one of the investigators' key suspects, after the
United States and Russia refused to divulge information on the scandal; Laurent Kasper-Ansermet, the magistrate in charge of the Swiss investigation, was also beaten unconscious while visiting
St Petersburg.
[4]In 2005, France commenced
money laundering investigations into companies linked to Abramovich, following an earlier investigation by
Tracfin, an agency of the French Finance Ministry.
[5]He was named the second-wealthiest person in the UK in the
Sunday Times Rich List 2006, with an estimated fortune of £10.8 billion."
Really takes a genius to become a billionaire when you manage to purchase a multi-billion pound company for £100 million. This b*stard is an out and out criminal - should be properly investigated and deported back to Russia to stand trial for robbing the Russian taxpayer.
Rant over.
