A Trial in Abstentia
Since the prospects that the British will hand over Boris Berezovsky are pretty much nil, the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office has decided to try BAB in absentia. Prosecutors told RIA Novosti that Berezovsky will be tried for “embezzling over 214 million rubles ($8.3 million) of the [Aeroflot's] funds and laundering over 16 million rubles ($620,000).” A conviction caries a 10 year prison sentence.
If you will remember, Paul Klebnikov called the monetary raping of Aeroflot part of the tripartite process of Russian gangster capitalism: 1) the privatization the profits; 2) the privatization of the property; and 3) the privatization of the debts. In a 1999 article in Forbes, Klebnikov described Berezovsky’s Aeroflot scam as a “textbook example” of the first.
The scam worked like this. Berezovsky and his partner Nikolai Glushkov created two front companies to handle Aeroflot’s funds. The first, an unknown Swedish ..read more
