Roman Abramovich: Premier League oligarch

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Welcome to Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service.

Every episode, we pick a billionaire and we find out how they made their money.

Then we judge them.

Are they good, bad, or just another billionaire?

My name is Zing Sing and I'm a journalist, author and podcaster.

And I'm Simon Jack.

I'm the BBC's business editor.

And on this episode, we have a very well-known billionaire.

Indeed.

A hero to Chelsea fans everywhere.

But someone with what I would describe as a colourful past.

Yeah, colourful is one way of putting it.

Murky.

He is a big football fan, likes his boats.

He really does.

And he is currently worth a core $9.7 billion.

It is Roman Abramovich.

So, Roman Abramovich is 58 years old.

He's one of the many oligarchs who made their fortunes from the post-Soviet privatization of public utilities.

And we'll delve into that, specifically in oil and aluminium.

He got into the latter during the infamous bloody aluminium wars.

More on that later.

But for years, he was never heard from or seen in public, and a Russian newspaper even offered one million rubles for a photo of him.

In fact, he became known as the stealth oligarch.

Behind the scenes though, he was a powerful figure, allegedly very close to Vladimir Putin from the early years of his presidency.

But he did lose 7 billion of his assets when they were frozen by the self-governing British crown dependency of Jersey in the wake of the Russia-Ukraine war.

Yeah, a lot of sanctions apply to a lot of people in Russia and he was caught up in that.

He became famous in the West when he bought Chelsea Football Club in 2003.

I remember that well.

People were punching there.

They said, finally, we've got some money.

Finally, the big spenders rolled in.

Yeah, Yeah, and in fact, he kind of set an example for billionaires buying football clubs.

Now, the club cost him a core $233 million,

but then he kept spending.

He spent around $900 million paying off the club's debt and bringing in very new and very expensive players.

Yeah, it was called Chelsky, I remember in those days.

That football's not his only passion.

He's thought to have 16 yachts.

The biggest of which cost get this $427 million.

How many yachts does one man need?

At 533 feet, the biggest one was then the largest in the world.

Two helicopter pads, two swimming pools and a disco hall.

And it also had bulletproof windows, a missile detection system and an escape submarine.

That tells you something, I think.

Very security conscious.

It's also reported he had a 40 strong security team, 20 in the UK, 20 to help him when traveling.

Cost him around $2.4 million per year.

So you might be asking at this point, why does a guy who's just in business need to spend so much money on protection, including, remember, that escaped submarine?

Yeah, well, being a Russian oligarch is a pretty dangerous business.

Quite a lot of them end up dead and sometimes in suspicious circumstances.

So in this episode, we'll try to find out why Roman Abramovich has stayed so rich and so alive for so long.

Although, could a recent suspected poisoning suggest his luck and his friends might be changing?

Now, before we get into this story, it's worth saying that tracing the money of Russian oligarchs can be quite tricky.

Yeah, and we're indebted to some fantastic and some brave journalists.

So, the biography Abramovich, The Billionaire from Nowhere, by Dominic Midgley and Chris Hutchins, was especially helpful.

As was the transcript from a 2012 British High Court case.

That case was brought against Roman Abramovich by his former mentor, a man known as, quote, the godfather of the Kremlin.

Yeah, Boris Berezhovsky.

Because of the case, Roman was forced to tell the world in his own words how he made his fortune.

And in the courtroom, he took the stand and said, I never made any public statements.

At least, I tried never to make any public statements.

I know I don't do it so well.

I become very nervous.

And if you scour the internet, it's impossible, I found, to find any footage of him actually talking.

Which is so odd because his name has loomed so large into public consciousness because of his football purchase for so many years.

So, nervous public speaker or powerful political operative?

Is he good, bad, or just another billionaire?

Roman Abramovich Abramovich was born in 1966 in Saratov, in what was then the Soviet Union, now southwestern Russia.

He had Jewish grandparents.

They'd fled to the USSR, as was then, from Lithuania and Ukraine during the Second World War.

His mother died when he was only young from blood poisoning of an abortion.

Then his father died two years later in a construction accident.

So Roman was orphaned at three years old, but he doesn't call his childhood bad.

He said he had the support of an extended family.

He was actually adopted by his paternal uncle, Lieb, moving over a thousand miles north to Ukta to live with him.

So how were they living?

Well they weren't rich.

Lieb and his wife actually gave up their bedroom for Roman and slept on the sofa in the living room and as the only male cousin Roman had a certain level of status in the family.

But his adoptive dad's job as a supplies manager gave him privileged access to food and clothing some of which Lieb resold on the black market so the family lived comfortably despite the harsh rationing of the time.

In fact we're told that Roman was the first boy in his neighborhood to own a Western-style cassette player.

For our younger audiences, this is something like a Sony Walkman that people used to walk around with.

It's a museum piece now.

And at the time, it would have made him a very popular person in the neighborhood.

Yeah.

Aged eight, Lieb sent Roman to Moscow to live with his other paternal uncle, Abraham, because the capital offered more opportunities, he says, for a business career.

Roman studied at a place called school number 232, which kind of gives you an idea of the pecking order there.

He was an academic, but he worked hard and he was eager to learn.

Yeah, friends remember he was quick on the uptake.

He liked efficiency.

You could feel energy in him.

And teachers remember that his uncle abraham was more doting than most fathers because he rushed to school the minute roman's results were published these were big influences on him because a close business associate of roman's has commented that roman is the synthesis of his two uncles from lieb he inherited discretion and business acumen from abraham altruism and vitality so roman left school at 17 and he was studying highway engineering at the ucta industrial institute when he was drafted for military service yeah life was tough in the red army roman though is remembered as a very social person.

He organised a football team for example and an amateur art group.

And quite common to a lot of our billionaire stories, he was also always on the lookout for ways to make money.

So one fellow soldier remembers Roman coming up with a scheme in which delivery drivers would allow fuel to be siphoned off from their vehicles and then sold to other drivers at a reduced price.

Yeah, hustling to make a buck is definitely something that's common among our billionaires.

One person said of him, he could make money out of thin air.

After leaving the army at 20, Roman worked as a mechanic in Moscow while returning to study before dropping out.

A lot of our billionaires drop out of their studies, don't they?

Yeah, it's funny.

Even in Russia.

It's not something you want to hear as a parent who wants their child to do well financially, but it does seem like dropping out is a common through line.

Around this time in his personal life, he'd met his first wife, Olga, who was a divorcee three years older than him.

Her parents gave them 2,000 rubles as a wedding present, which was at the time roughly 10 months of the average Russian salary.

And they used that money to start a new business.

They made rubber ducks and other plastic children's toys.

And soon they were earning 3,000 to 4,000 rubles a month.

So that kind of works out to 20 times the average Russian's monthly salary.

And we should say here, we often put things in dollar terms, but it's quite difficult when it comes to Russian rubles to dollars because there were strict capital controls.

It wasn't that easy to tell how many rubles were to the dollar in those days.

And that's changed a lot over the years.

Roman threw himself into work, so much so that Olga said it was a reason for the divorce just two years later.

She says, he would get up early and go straight to work and not be back until midnight.

I was convinced he was a workaholic.

It seemed he loved his business more than he loved me.

To understand the Roman Abramich story, we need to understand what's going on in the Soviet Union as it was then.

And once again, not for the first time, we're looking at people who've made money as the world around them was changing.

Sort of Jack Maher in China.

We talked about Mukash Ambani in India.

Russia is going through some massive changes.

So rewind back to 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev became head of the Communist Party and introduced what was called perestroika or restructuring to boost the then flagging Russian economy.

This was a huge change and in a way this marked the end of the Cold War and a lot of people said in this sort of arms race of the Cold War, the US's wealth had essentially bankrupted Russia and they realized there had to be a change.

So there had been strict price controls, but now some businesses could decide for themselves which products they wanted to make, how much to produce and what to charge, which before was basically determined by the state.

Yeah, so Roman, among others, began to take advantage of some of these new rules.

He traveled between his uncle's homes, he would fill his suitcase with Western goods which were coming into Moscow-things like jeans, perfume, chocolate, and then sell them at a profit a thousand miles away in Uktar.

And then on the 9th of November 1989, a seismic event happened: the fall of the Berlin War.

By December 1991, the USSR, the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, was formally dissolved.

Golbachev resigned, and Boris Yeltsin became president of Russia.

And at the start of 1992, Yeltsin's government removed more price controls on products.

And this sudden adoption of the free market and rapid privatization, that's key, was called shock therapy, designed to jolt Russia into embracing capitalism.

So really, we talk about the end of the Cold War and America essentially bankrupting Russia.

But, you know, it's not just about...

money or arms.

It's also about ideology.

And in this case, America triumphed.

Yeah, and it created the perfect environment for the rise of Russian oligarchs.

Suddenly there was this kind of new frontier to sort of to prosper basically.

Basically the Wild West.

It was freewheeling.

I remember that time really well actually within months Roman Abramovich is said to have launched nearly 20 different businesses trading timber, sugar, food, tire repairs, pig breeding, even bodyguard services.

They'll be needed later.

Basically throwing everything at the war and seeing what's done.

Exactly.

Many failed, but they offered him a steep business learning curve and his reputation and his portfolio of businesses was growing.

But what Roman Abramovich really wanted to get into was oil.

Yeah, the pre-Yeltsin Soviet regime had made money by selling Russian-produced oil at a discount to traders that was sold on the global market.

The profits then went back to the state.

But now profits could go to private operators, and Roman was one of the many people who spotted this potential.

So he had a company called Petrol Trans, which started with the Russia domestic market sourcing oil from a government-owned refinery in western Siberia.

He then transported and sold that throughout Russia.

It's around this time, which is 1992, that it's said he was accused in Russia of, quote, procuring financial gain by means of fraud.

He was also, by the way, only 25.

Yeah, and this period was very murky.

As you say, there were claims, counter-claims, and it's alleged he was arrested as the main suspect for stealing a consignment of diesel from a train going from Uktar to Moscow, valued around 4 billion rubles.

The exchange rate was moving a lot in those years.

So that could be anywhere between $9 and $35 million.

It is really wild West cowboy stuff.

So a document detailing this was shown in a 2012 court case, and it was reported in a 2022 BBC Panorama episode that he was arrested, but later that this case kind of disappeared without a trace.

And his lawyers told the program it was all a misunderstanding and the matter was resolved.

So over the next few years, he grows his oil business and he launches various companies trading in petroleum products.

Yeah, his network of companies quickly becomes one of the largest petroleum trading networks in all of Russia.

And crucially for his growth, he expands rapidly into international exports.

In 1993, his companies were trading 400,000 tons of petroleum.

Just a year later, that increased to 3 million.

That's a 650% increase within a year.

That's serious numbers.

And in his own words, Roman Abramovich became a, quote, first-class international negotiator.

So, how much is he worth at this point?

It's hard to know when he made his very first million, but we've got some numbers from his own testimony in court documents.

By the mid-1990s, he said he was generating around $40 million per year through his trading company.

So in his late 20s, Roman Bramfic, successful oil trader, he's almost certainly a multi-millionaire.

But he's also about to be introduced to a man who will change the course of his life and Chelsea Football Club and someone he'll end up going head to head with in court.

Enter the scene Boris Berezhovsky, a connection who the New York Times Athletic magazine puts it, turns Roman from wheeler-dealer wannabe to the seriously rich.

So, who is this man and mentor who will help Roman Abramovich become a billionaire?

Let's rewind back to December 1994 and set the scene.

We're at a party, we're on a yacht, we're in the Caribbean, and Roman is here as a guest of the president of Russia's largest privately held bank.

I'm getting the vibes of this atmosphere already.

On the yacht, Roman is introduced to Boris Berezhovsky.

He was a power broker, he was nicknamed Godfather of the Kremlin, apparently even described himself as one of the most influential oligarchs in Russia and a billionaire to boot.

Billionaire meet billionaire.

Now, Boris Borozhovsky was 48 compared to Roman's 28.

He was a former car salesman who had made his fortune by capitalizing on the early years of Yelsin's privatization process.

Yeah, and Berezhovsky was impressed with Roman's ambitious idea to create this new vertically integrated oil company, vertically integrated means capable of managing the entire production chain.

The problem was that the companies Roman would need were actually owned by the state, and Roman had no political connections.

In his own words, he says, I was not a well-established, well-known business figure at that stage.

That doesn't reflect whether I had a big business or a small business.

It's just I created little noise around myself.

He moves in silence like the wind.

Yeah, and you needed this kind of, you know, cover.

There's a Russian word for it, krisha.

It literally means roof, and what it means is political influence and cover and insurance, basically.

And Boris Berezhovsky had that in spades.

So he was very close to the president, Boris Yeltsin.

In fact, Berezhovsky had paid for the publication of Yeltsin's memoirs, befriended his daughter, helped bankroll his re-election campaign.

All of this gave him great access to Yeltsin's inner circle.

And Roman said of Borozhovsky offering him Krisha, at the time, Borozhovsky was already known to me as someone someone who had big political influence in Moscow.

I realized he could provide me with important contacts.

Moreover, I was aware that he was believed to have strong connections to Chechen elements, which exerted a powerful influence in Moscow at the time.

Now, Boris Borozhovsky has denied any links to organized crime.

But at this time, there was a real free-for-all where people were trying to get their hands on what previously had been national assets.

There was this kind of gold rush.

Berezhovsky knew of another national asset for sale, the Russian oil company company Sibneft.

So Berezovsky, if you remember from that chat on the yacht, had been impressed by Roman.

Hey, Ryan, that was a fast trip.

It was like you teleported.

Yeah, just got in.

I'll get all my expenses logged, I promise.

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Margaret, are you building a teleporter?

No.

Yes.

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Nabramovich's plan to create a big new oil conglomerate that could manage the entire production chain, the extraction, the refining, the selling, and the Sibnef deal could make that become a reality.

But the details of any deal between the two men have been disputed so much so that they later went to court.

But it is widely reported and documented in the trial that for substantial cash payments to Boris Berezhovsky, Abramovich would get his political patronage and influence.

So, according to Roman himself, he paid Berzhovsky between $50 to $80 million a year through the 90s, plus personal expenses that paid for, you know, like trifling things like Berzhovsky's French Riviera home, chartering yachts in a private jet, even occasionally his girlfriend's credit card bills.

So Sibneft was auctioned off in 1995.

Together, Abramovich and Berezhovsky spent months negotiating with the government.

And this would have been a huge deal because the Russian state was essentially just having a fire sale of all their assets.

Yeah, and a Yeltsin advisor said Berezhovsky was ready to sleep on the Kremlin floor to get his hands on it.

But they had one problem.

So at the center of Sibneft was an oil processing plant, and that was run by Ivan Litskovich, a very influential figure in the region.

Now, they needed to get him on side, but he was actually against the privatization of the company and he remained firmly so even after he received several letters urging him to change his mind.

And then, just days before the new Sibneft was established by presidential decree, Ivan Litskiewicz drowned in a river one swimming, apparently from a heart attack, according to the official death report.

His driver, the only witness, later died in a fight.

Now, when Roman was asked if it was true that Ivan Litskiewicz died in, quote, difficult circumstances, he simply replied, he drowned.

Ultimately though, punchline of this story, Roman Abramvich takes control of 88% of Sibneft for about $240 million.

It's thought he may have put in as little as 19 million of his own money with the remainder coming from bank loans.

And thanks to his oil trading connections, he soon turned the refinery around.

In 1995, when he first got involved with Sibnev, it had losses of $206 million,

but within two years, it was making a profit of $68 million.

So until now, Roman hadn't been a public public figure.

He kept well away from the media.

He was the oligarch no one had ever heard of and no one had seen.

There weren't even photographs available.

Anytime he was reporting the press, they had to use a sketch like the Wall Street Journal.

Very old school.

But the Sibneft auction captured the media's attention.

So it was getting harder and harder for him to stay out of the spotlight.

In 1998, he's referred to on Russian TV as Yeltsin's wallet, meaning a good chunk of the money he was paying to Boris Berezhovsky was used for Yeltsin's re-election campaign.

And this idea of being the president's wallet is something that will come up with the current president.

And in 1999, one Russian newspaper offered a million rubles for a photograph of him.

That's around $40,000.

Wow.

This blurry photograph was taken.

It was used for the next few years until Bramovich paid a photojournalist to take a selection of proper photos for the press.

So as with many of our billionaires, Roman Abramovich next looked to diversify his portfolio, and he did that into aluminium.

Yeah, this is the thing that makes him very seriously rich.

The competition, though, to control this area of the metal markets was really fierce.

From the mid-1990s, Russian oligarchs were involved in what was called the aluminium wars.

Now, this wasn't a kind of metaphor.

It's not a boardroom war of anything.

It was literally genuinely physical conflict.

Exactly.

It was genuine physical conflict.

So, for instance, when an entrepreneur would buy aluminium smelters or processing plants, they would become a target for others who would hire criminals to pressure them into selling.

Yeah, one oligarch told the BBC he lived under constant threat, this guy called Anatoly Bykov.

He said, they tried to blow up my car, they shot at me, and all this meant Roman was reluctant to get involved, saying every three days someone was being murdered.

But by 1999, he knew some of the key players were keen to sell to get out of the wars.

He said, while the level of violence in the industry had diminished somewhat by the late 90s, it was still a potentially dangerous business, and there was a real need for anyone wishing to get involved to have physical krisha to ensure control and stability.

That means rufal protection, remember?

Notwithstanding that, he said, I could see the potential for bringing the business together.

And in 2000, the year 2000, he bought controlling stakes in Russia's two biggest smelters in Siberia for an estimated $600 million from a Geneva-based trading giant called Transworld Metals.

Now, to avoid competition, he then merged companies with another oligarch, Oleg Derepaska, creating Rusau, Russian aluminium, which then made it one of the world's biggest metals companies.

Yeah, Oleg Derepaska became quite famous in the UK.

Remember, Derepaska had a yacht on which he was courting lots of UK politicians.

And anyway, it creates a big stink about Russian money in British politics.

That's where Deripaska hit the name.

I recognize the name.

Anyway, Roman said of this merger, with that, I had significantly increased the chances my investment in the industry would be a success.

So uniting those assets meant that the two oligarchs had 75% of Russia's yearly aluminium output, which is massive.

So it's predicted that nearly all of the production would be exported with approximate sales of $3.4 billion.

Yeah, there's no evidence they had any hand in the aluminium wars, all the violence which went with it.

You know, journalists, bank manager all ended up dead.

But one of the outcomes of this Derepaska-Abramovich consortium is that the metal murders came to an end.

One Russian journalist named Koselyov said that the blood trail stopped and suggested that perhaps Abramovich and Derepaska, quote, may be more powerful than the gangsters, which is an interesting way of putting it.

Yeah, so he's incredibly successful now.

He's basically got a monopoly on the aluminium business in Russia.

But the political landscape is about to change again in Russia.

In 1999, Boris Yeltsin appointed Vladimir Putin as prime minister.

And as Yeltsin was growing weaker due to illness, he effectively handed over the business of daily governing to his new PM.

Yes, that is 25 years ago.

Still there.

Yeltsin then resigned.

Putin was elected president in March 2000.

So as you would expect, Roman Abramovich wanted to meet Vladimir Putin.

And it's not clear when they met for the first time because he often plays down that relationship.

But it's thought that they were introduced in the late 90s through Boris Bozhovsky.

In 1999, he attended Putin's birthday party.

And when Putin became president, he asked Roman Abramovich to vet his choices for cabinet.

And he wasn't just involved in politics behind the scenes.

In 1999, Roman was elected to the state Duma as the representative for the Chukotka region, which is a pretty poor part of Russia's Arctic Far East.

And in 2000, he became governor there, a post he held until 2008.

Now, you might be asking yourself, that seems really random, but Chukotka does have large reserves of natural resources.

Abramovich's company actually controls a small gold mine there.

But it seems it was more than just a title.

He invested over a billion dollars in the region during his governorship, although there were rumors that he made a pact with Vladimir Putin to return some of his oil and aluminium wealth through development in Chukotka.

Interestingly, it's been reported that this position gave him immunity from investigations by Putin's anti-monopoly minister, who had recently been asked to investigate the aluminium deal.

This is a guy called Ilya Yuzinov, and he later reported that the purchases had not violated anti-monopoly walls.

It's all fine.

Very convenient.

And it was in 2001 while Roman Abramovich was governor of Chukotka that Forbes first listed him on their billionaire list with an estimated net worth of $1.4 billion.

So age 34, Roman Abramovich is a billionaire.

He was the 363rd richest person in the world and the fifth richest Russian listed.

And he doesn't stop there.

Within just a year, his wealth had more than doubled to $3 billion, and he had climbed to 127th richest in the world and become the second richest Russian on the planet.

By 2003, his oil company Sivneft was worth 15 billion US dollars, and Russell had $4 billion in annual sales, making it the world's second largest producer of aluminium.

But as one star rises, another must fall.

And in this case, it was Boris Berezhovsky's.

Yes, in 2000, Berezhovsky had feuded with Putin and fled Russia for London.

And by 2001, Abramovich and Berezhovsky had parted ways.

He paid Berezhowski a lump sum of $1.3 billion to cut ties.

Now, interestingly, this buyout became increasingly bitter with Berzhovsky taking his former mentee and protégé to the UK High Court in 2012 in a big trial called Berzhovsky versus Abramovich.

Berezhovsky claimed Abramovich had intimidated him into selling shares in Sidnev at a fraction of their value and wanted over £3 billion in damages, around nearly $5 billion.

But Roman Abramovich actually won this battle in high court.

The judge dismissed Berezhovsky's claims, stating there was no evidence of intimidation and said that Abramovich had been a meticulous, responsible, and careful witness.

Now, a year later, in 2013, Boris Berezhovsky was found dead in his British home.

The coroner recorded an open verdict following two days of contradictory evidence about the way he was found hanged, but he said he could not prove beyond all reasonable doubt that he either took his own life or was unlawfully killed.

Talk about a plot twist.

Yeah, no kidding.

That was a big story, as you can imagine, in 2013.

So let's take Roman Abramovich's story beyond a billion.

What does a billionaire do with his money?

He buys a football club, of course.

And in 2003, he bought Chelsea, which was a big surprise.

It was the biggest takeover in British football history at that time.

Roman Abramovich said that that buying the club had an impact on my way of life significantly it was the turning point really yeah i mean chelsea fans were ecstatic they had a sugar daddy with plenty of money to spend on players and actually having been quite a shadowy figure he was regularly on the telly watching chelsea you could see that he had a real emotion he really loved his football but some call that thing about buying a football club sports washing you get such a high public profile you're part of something that everyone loves and therefore in a way it kind of insulates you from other allegations It makes you immune.

Yeah, exactly.

It puts a bubble around you.

Football teams however are really expensive so buying Chelsea cost him about $233 million

and it was estimated he'd have to cover around 130 million in depths that the club already had.

Yeah, but not much when you compare to how much he actually is worth.

He was worth around 15 billion at this time.

Over the next decade he would spend big on footballers.

He would break English transfer records and a football finance expert, a guy called Kieran Maguire said, and Bramovich turned football from a millionaire's plaything into a billionaire's plaything.

And it really started a whole series of mergers.

If you think now, basically, all these football clubs have very rich foreign owners.

Liverpool,

Manchester United, Newcastle is owned by Saudis.

So he really set the mould of rich foreign owners buying trophy assets like football clubs.

And is it right to say that this is around the time that, you know, London was becoming home to so many Russian oligarchs, big Russian money?

I think at one point it was called London Grad.

Yeah, exactly.

There were huge mansions in Mayfair.

People were buying country houses.

You know, lots of old stately homes were suddenly being snapped up by Russians.

There's a real Russian invasion of big money into the UK, and especially London.

I mean, I remember a time when if you walked into places like Harrods or Selfridge's, you would have store assistants who would be able to speak Russian because that was where the money was being spent.

And very ostentatiously spent as well.

It was an incredible display of conspicuous consumption.

Chelsea, in other words.

Yeah.

Now, fortunately, Roman Abramovich was able to raise huge funds to buy Chelsea.

So three months after buying the club, he sold his shares in Rousseau to co-owner Oleg Deropaska for $1 billion.

Yeah, and two years later, he liquidated his biggest assets, the Sydneft Oil Company.

He sold his shares back to the state for $13 billion.

This deal meant that within a decade, his initial investment had been returned more than a thousand-fold.

And it also meant that in 2006, he was the 11th richest person in the world with $18 billion.

So for the next decade, Roman Abramovich lived your typical billionaire football owner life in London Grad.

But that was about to change.

He did live a typical life.

I saw him myself

in my local newspaper shop just off Kensington Park Road.

And there he was buying a newspaper, which is rare enough as it is, buying a physical newspaper, I'm sorry to say.

Then he came out and his wife and children were there.

I said, why is he just walking around?

Where are the bodyguards?

I'm sure they must have been stationed along every single door.

In a bulletproof range rover around the corner.

But anyway, there he was walking along the street.

Important question.

Did you see which newspaper he bought?

I did not.

I did not.

I can't.

Actually, I think it was Financial Times, which would make sense.

Yeah, that would make sense.

So how was his life about to change in London?

In the late 2010s, the UK government cracked down on wealthy investors coming to the country after the poisoning of former Russian spy, Sergei Skripo, in Salisbury.

Yeah, that was a big moment.

And that was the Russian state assassinating someone on British soil.

A big moment.

So those changes meant that those on investor visas could now be required to prove the origins of their wealth.

Yeah and in 2018 Roman Abramovich's British investor visa expired and then he withdrew his application for a renewed visa.

Instead, he became an Israeli citizen and moved to Tel Aviv.

And then in 2021 he was granted European citizenship after being given a Portuguese passport.

And of course then came the Russia invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

That really changed things for your average oligarch.

The EU and the UK imposed some quite swinging sanctions.

Roman had his assets frozen due to his close ties to the Kremlin, something he denies.

But leaked papers do reveal evidence that connected Abramovich to a $40 million secret deal with two men dubbed Putin's Wallets, close friends of Putin, who held money on assets on his behalf.

Back in 2010, our own Frank Gardner was a part of that investigation.

Now, all this had a knock-on effect on Chelsea because this restricted the football club from selling tickets, merchandise, or entering into new sponsorship deals.

Yeah, so you can't sell tickets because the money's going to a sanctioned person.

You're in deep doo-doo there.

So in a way, that forced the sale in 2022 of Chelsea, sold for nearly $5 billion.

Roman people bought it for $233 million, paid off a bunch of debt.

So he's made some money on this to a group led by American billionaire Todd Burley.

But Roman didn't actually get proceeds from the sale.

So the government agreed to allow him to sell the club, even though he was under sanctions, on the condition that the money was spent helping victims of the war in Ukraine.

Obviously, if you're basically being kind of run out of the country because sanctions and your links to Putin, well, you've got other things to worry about.

But I think that having to get rid of Chelsea must have been a big wrench for him.

It was a real baby of his.

You knew that he could see that he was actually, you know, passionate about the actual football club.

He'd done wonders at Chelsea.

So selling that must have been a big wrench.

And he'd also kind of sold off quite a lot of his assets in order to keep funding the club and making it successful, right?

So he put quite a lot of his own money in it.

And also, not only that, he had to sell it and then wasn't allowed to take the proceeds because, of course, he couldn't benefit.

There were financial sanctions on oligarchs at that time.

So that money remains locked in a UK bank account, frozen, if you like, amid a row between Abramovich and the government as to how exactly that money can be spent.

And just the month before, Abramovich had lost his legal challenge to the EU sanctions, and a statement issued on his behalf said, Mr.

Abramovich does not have the ability to influence the decision-making of any government, including Russia, and has in no way benefited from the war, as in the war in Ukraine.

Yeah, of course.

And since that war, he's been spending most of his time in Russia, Turkey, the UAE, where governments have not imposed any sanctions on Russian oligarchs.

So, where does that leave Roman Abramovich today?

He spent decades in favor with the Kremlin when many of his other oligarch peers didn't fare too well.

Yeah, he's still, definitely still rich.

Forbes lists his current net worth at nearly 10 billion US dollars, and he owns stakes in huge steel and nickel companies still.

But he had a net worth of $14.5 billion in 2022 before the Channel Island jersey, known for low taxes, froze $7 billion of those assets.

Yeah, and there is a question mark over his power and his relationship with powers in the Kremlin.

In 2022, he suffered what's been described as a suspected poisoning.

Yeah, so at this point, he joined Russian and Ukrainian peace negotiators at talks on the Ukraine-Belarus border.

Yeah, and there, he and two Ukrainian peace negotiators suffered symptoms of suspected poisoning, sore eyes, peeling skin, and chemical weapons specialists concluded they believe it was an intentional use of a chemical agent.

Now, the BBC's own security correspondent Frank Gardner's analysis was that, quote, inevitably people will be wondering if this was the work of the GRU, Russia's military intelligence service, who Britain concluded was behind the Novichok Salisbury poisoning in 2018.

There's been no immediate comment from Russia and no proof they were responsible.

But somebody, it seems, wanted to send a warning to those taking part in the peace talks.

This was not a lethal dose, it was a warning.

Gosh, interesting stuff.

So there we have it.

There is the story of Roman Abramovich.

He's always downplayed his connections to the Kremlin and to Vladimir Putin, but we do know that they knew each other quite early on in Putin's relationship.

So, we're going to have to now decide whether he's good, bad, or just another billionaire in our category.

So, we'll start with absolute wealth.

Pretty good.

Pretty good.

So, with the increasing number of centi-billionaires, however, 100 billion.

Yeah, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, etc., that makes him only 235th richest in the world with nearly 10 billion.

So he's fallen quite a lot since being number 11.

You've fallen a long way.

Yeah, and part of this category is we judge them based on how they spend their money.

And obviously there's nothing bigger than buying a football club.

And a yacht and he's got lots of them and his yachts are enormous.

At one point he had the world's biggest super yacht.

So I'm going to give him, based on conspicuous consumption of football franchises and yachts, I'm going to give him an eight out of 10.

Oh, I'm going to give him a nine out of ten because, I mean, yachts ten a penny in the billionaire stakes, but a yacht with its own missile detection system and escape submarine, I mean, come on, that gets you pretty high in the billionaire states.

That's proper Bond villain vibes there, right?

Proper Bond villain vibes makes you wonder if there's a white cat roaming the halls.

Yeah, okay, so eight from me, nine from you.

Rags to riches.

I think he scores pretty highly on this one.

He didn't come from money.

Yeah, in fact, I think the Times described his story as a uniquely Russian story that begins in relative poverty.

Remember, he was an orphan.

Yeah, orphaned at three, brought up by his two uncles in a pretty remote part of Russia, was sent to Moscow, served his time in the Red Army.

I think this is definitely an eight for me.

I'd actually agree.

And a lot of our billionaires don't come from humble origins.

Very few of them come from what you could describe as poverty.

But being an orphan, I mean, doesn't get more kind of Charles Dickens than that.

And also, you know, he's managed to stay alive as well, which is another impressive thing, because not all of them did.

That is true.

So I think it's an eight out of ten for me, too.

Okay, villainy.

As reported by the BBC in 2023, leaked documents reveal a money trail that seemed to link Roman Abramovich to two men dubbed wallets of Vladimir Putin.

That means they held money and assets on Putin's behalf.

So Mr.

Abramovich hasn't actually responded to requests for comment from the BBC on these allegations.

They think that Vladimir Putin, some people estimate he could have a fortune of about $100 to even $200 billion,

but that money is held by other people on his behalf.

Notably, Roman Abramovich has also been accused of corruption since the deal with Sibnev.

So he's also admitted to paying for Berezhovsky's protection and political influence in the 2012 trial.

So he argued at the time during that trial that that was just how things were done in Russia at the time.

Yeah, but journalists continue to argue that he amassed his wealth through some criminality, which he continues to deny.

So on villainy, I think we're going to have to...

score this pretty high.

Yeah.

I'm going to have to give him a nine for villainy.

Well, hang on a second.

He's not an arms dealer.

He's not been convicted of anything.

And he hasn't been convicted of anything.

And he denies all these claims.

Exactly.

He denies all of this stuff.

So given the fact we don't have any hard proof of this, there were some allegations.

I'm going to give him a seven.

I'll be bolder and give him an eight.

You're braver than me.

Okay.

Let me know if I suddenly start breaking out in a skin rush.

Okay, philanthropy.

How much money has he given away?

What's he done for charity?

Yeah, he could redeem himself here.

Well, it's hard to know how much he's given, but in 2018, it was reported he'd given $500 million to Jewish causes in Russia.

It's a lot.

He's also reportedly spent $1 billion on Chukotka, where he was the governor for over eight years, and he seems to have done some good in the region.

Analysts based in Russia's Far East say that the quality of life for those regions, tens of thousands of residents has skyrocketed under his tenure.

So when he was interviewed in 2001 about why he was spending so much money there, he said he was, quote, fed up with making money all the time.

God wish some of us felt that way.

He also explained, I started business early, so maybe that's why I'm bored with it.

So the bored billionaire.

The bored billionaire.

Also, you know, Chelsea fans will say he did them a pair of good, so they will see that as some kind of corporate charity, although the club was worth $5 billion by the time he sold it, even though he couldn't get to keep the money because of the sanctions.

Did they ever win the Premier League?

In fact, Chelsea have won multiple times, and they've also won the Champions League, which is the top club prize in all of football.

So if you're a Chelsea fan, he must be Mother Teresa.

Exactly.

So on that, I mean, there's quite a lot of, that's quite a lot he's given away.

I'm going to give him a solid six for that.

I think I'd give him a six out of ten as well.

Yeah, I'd agree with you.

But, you know, I'm not revising my score on villainy.

Okay.

So power.

Interesting one.

I mean, clearly he knows how to negotiate with power, clearly, because you don't get rich in post-Soviet Russia without knowing how to handle yourself because it was a wild West where a lot of people ended up dead.

And also how to handle other people, right?

Yeah, exactly.

I would say that he knows how to navigate power.

Whether he has much himself,

there's not much room for any other one other than Vladimir Putin, I don't think.

I think he kills all the shots.

And so by comparison, people within Russia don't have much power.

So and if the tide turns against you, it would turn quite fast.

Yeah, okay.

I'm going to give him five for power.

Or no, four.

I think probably a five.

I feel like...

Given the fact that he used to spend so much time in London, I think he'd have quite a lot of power while he was in the UK, especially as a football club owner.

Yeah, okay.

Four for me, five for you.

Legacy.

He really set a trend for billionaires buying football clubs.

So he has a legacy of sorts in that sense.

Other than that, he will be remembered as the most visible.

Having tried to be the least visible, he ends up as the most visible of the oligarchs of that period in London, I think.

Which is funny.

I think if you asked someone in the UK, name a rich Russian oligarch.

It's Abramovich.

For sure.

In fact, you know that Robbie Williams song, Party Like a Russian?

I think it was kind of Abramovich inspired.

Okay, so he's got a legacy of being the kind of poster child for Russian oligarchs of the mid-90s and noughties.

So I think for legacy, it's an eight out of 10 for me.

It's a seven for me.

And then we have to decide, is he good, bad, or just another billionaire?

I think he's got to be bad.

Oh, I mean, obviously he denies all these allegations and claims of corruption.

But there's something in the story, I think, that gives me what I would call bad vibes.

I just don't think you get super rich in post-Soviet Russia and come out squeaky clean and be an angel.

No, in fact, it's hard to think of a single Russian oligarch who has done that.

No, agreed.

I mean, some are worse than others, I think.

But generally speaking, I'd have to say, Roman Nebramovich, I'm so sorry because you did great things for Chelsea, but you are a bad billionaire.

I am not a Chelsea fan, so I have no compunction in saying that.

Roman Nebramovich, you are probably a bad billionaire.

So, who do we have on the next episode?

No slim pickings.

This guy has got a vast wealth.

He is a centi-billionaire, meaning he's worth over $100 billion.

And for a short time in the 2000s, he edged Bill Gates out of richest man in the world spot.

And he is also the richest man in Latin America.

It is Carlos Slim.

Good, Bad Billionaire was produced by Hannah Hufford and Louise Morris, with additional production support from Tams and Curry.

James Cook is the editor, and it's a BBC Studios production for BBC World World Service.

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