Word: oligarchize
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...thought about buying yourself an English Premier League soccer team over the past few years, the chances are you're wealthy - and foreign. Overseas investors have bagged seven of the country's top-flight teams in the last five years, from the $218 million that Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich found for London club Chelsea in 2003, to the $1.4 billion shelled out for Manchester United a couple of years later by U.S. tycoon Malcolm Glazer (owner of the NFL's Tampa Bay Buccaneers). The investors' goal: to score a slice of the richest soccer league in the world. Buoyed...
...years ago sells for $47,000 now. Most foreign clients buy fine wine as an investment, but some aren't thinking quite so long-term. Miles remembers once getting an urgent order for a case of $2,000 half bottles of 1982 Lafite Rothschild "because some Russian oligarch wanted it delivered to his private jet and a half-bottle was all he could handle on his flight back to Moscow...
What Russia does have is money. Many in the oligarch class have achieved the kind of stability and self-assurance required to relinquish their much-guarded privacy and enter this very public sphere as investors and producers. Entering the offices of Igor Desyatnikov in central Moscow, visitors are obliged to pass through a metal detector, then withstand the menacing stares of several bodyguards. Desyatnikov himself sits behind a large walnut-topped desk, a colonel's sheepskin hat resting on a far corner. Desyatnikov made his fortune in the sale of a private bank in 2004, and he heads an investor...
...Gaucho's Eastern European career has been a bit of a roller-coaster ride. In Bulgaria, he played for Levski, a Sofia-based club then owned by a Russian oligarch named Michael Chorny who, at the time, was banned from setting foot on Bulgarian soil because of alleged ties with organized crime. A big star in Sofia, Gaucho threw a tantrum after a coach replaced him in an important UEFA Champions League qualification match. He picked up his brother and a bottle of Jack Daniels and disappeared for a week, leaving reporters to speculate about his whereabouts. (He had retreated...
...opponents. Because a formal takeover document needed to be acceptable to regulators in five different countries, it took four months to put the paperwork together. That allowed Arcelor time to rally shareholders in its defense. But then Dollé made an egregious error: he arranged for a Russian oligarch, Alexei Mordashov, to take a 30%-plus stake in Arcelor. "The day we received that news, we felt it was over for us," Mittal recalls. "The whole team was disappointed and somber." But when they looked at the Russian deal more closely, Mittal and his advisers realized that Arcelor was essentially...