LONDON (AP) — How do you burn through billions?
The unexplained death of Boris Berezovsky, whose body was found Saturday inside his upscale English home, has refocused attention on the fantastic wealth racked up by Russia's ruthless oligarchs — and their propensity for spending it. Berezovsky, 67, had once been considered Russia's richest man — but by this January, a British judge was wondering whether the tycoon would be able to pay his debts.
To understand how one man could lose so much money, it helps to see how he made it in the first place.
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FOUNDATIONS OF A FORTUNE
Berezovsky, a mathematician, made his fortune in the 1990s during the catastrophic privatization of the Soviet Union's state-run economy. That era was marked by hyperinflation, contract killings and rampant corruption. As Russia's GDP crumbled, oligarchs leveraged their ties to ruthless criminals and crooked officials to tear off huge chunks of the country's assets for themselves, draining resources and stripping factories to build fabulous fortunes.
Berezovsky — whose interests ran from automobiles to airplanes to aluminum — was one of this dark period's primary beneficiaries. He became a political operator in Russian President Boris Yeltsin's inner circle, trading on his connections to rack up assets estimated by Forbes to be worth roughly $3 billion in 1997.
"No man profited more from Russia's slide into the abyss," author Paul Klebnikov wrote in a critical profile of Berezovsky titled "Godfather of the Kremlin."
Eventually, the abyss began threatening Berezovsky as well.