Word: lebedev
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Alexander Lebedev is telling the story of how he met his girlfriend, Elena Perminova, who is 22 and heavily pregnant. We are sitting in the dining room of Lebedev's house in the ultra-exclusive enclave of Rublyovka, just west of Moscow, early this year. The house includes an underground pool with a cherub-laden fresco on the ceiling, Italian marble floors and a huge ovoid window onto a grand staircase that, Lebedev says, is typical of classical Italian architecture. Outside, there are four or five guards milling around in the driveway. Former President Boris Yeltsin once lived beyond...
...distributing drugs in a disco in Novosibirsk," Lebedev says of Perminova. "She was actually arrested when she was 16, and she cooperated with the authorities, and she almost got killed." The police, Lebedev says, were unable or unwilling to provide a safe haven for people who helped them arrest local drug barons. Perminova's father wrote to Lebedev, he says. At the time - this was about five years ago - Lebedev was still a deputy in the Duma and lobbying for a witness-protection program. He says that no one in the Duma leadership supported him, but that he met with...
...this particular juncture in Russian history, it is Lebedev's self-assigned role to play, simultaneously, the oligarch and the anti-oligarch - to be the big, brash banking magnate whose estimated wealth prior to the financial crisis was around $3.7 billion and to decry the system that produces people like him, to live among the powerful while lambasting those who lord it over others. Before the global downturn, which Lebedev says has cost him $1 billion, he was a predictable, if persistent, critic of former President and current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, routinely calling for an independent legislature, a free...
...Khodorkovsky, the former head of Yukos who was convicted of fraud and tax evasion, is back in court, along with his former business partner Platon Lebedev - also serving eight years on a tax evasion conviction - to face fresh charges of embezzling $25 billion. A conviction could add another 22 years to the current eight-year sentence of which he has served five and a half years. The tycoon was convicted in 2005 of fraud and tax evasion, but prosecutors have introduced the new charges, claiming they are based on evidence brought forward by erstwhile Yukos subsidiary companies...
...trial, Khodorkovsky and Lebedev will face an old nemesis, prosecutor Dmitry Shokhin, who helped convict the tycoon in 2005. A defense request for the removal of the judge after Khodrokovsky was prevented from sitting outside a cage during the trial was denied, as was a request to change prosecutors. Ten pro-Khodorkovsky demonstrators were arrested earlier this week. The court adjourned on Friday until March 11, pending a defense request to terminate the case on the grounds that the defendant committed no crime...