sloth
Well-Known Member
- Mar 7, 2005
- 9,018
- 6,900
Many people seem to want a billionaire sugar-daddy, I think people should be careful what they wish for. I thought I'd profile some of football's current billionaires...
Alisher Usmanov
Beneath I post some general info taken from wikipededia, and also an article from the Guardian in 2007 when allegations of corruption, sexual violence, raketeering, and connections to the Russian mob, the KGB and Vladamir Putin were put to him.
Alisher Burkhanovich Usmanov (Uzbek: Alisher Usmonov, Алишер Бурханович Усмонов) (born 9 September 1953) is an Uzbek-born Russian business magnate. According to the 2011 edition of Forbes magazine, the oligarch Usmanov is Russia's richest man, with a fortune estimated at $18.1 billion, and the world's 28th richest person.[1] According to the December 2012 Bloomberg Billionaires Index, he has an estimated net worth of $17.3 billion, making him the 39th richest person in the world.[4] In April 2013, the Sunday Times listed him as the richest person in the UK, ousting Lakshmi Mittal for the number one spot. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alisher_Usmanov
With a fortune estimated at around £2.7bn, somewhat more than the annual GDP of Nicaragua or Haiti, Alisher Usmanov is one of the world's wealthiest men. He sits on the board of trustees of the Bolshoi Theatre, is president of the European Fencing Federation and is a founder of an arts and sporting charity.
One of his homes is an exquisite Tudor manor house set in 300 acres of Surrey countryside, while his offices at the Moscow headquarters of Metalloinvest, his mining and steel company, have all the trappings one might expect of one of the city's most successful entrepreneurs: elaborate security, tapestries and gold leaf trimmings, enormous screens flickering with the latest stock prices and a desk that seems to stretch forever.
Last August, the Uzbek-born businessman declared himself a fan of English football, and of Arsenal in particular. He bought 14.58% of the club's shares, and the following month increased that stake to 23%, worth £120m, making him the club's second-largest shareholder. Few in football, or the City, doubt that he would dearly love to take complete control.
It being an immutable rule of the modern game that a vast sum of cash is the first requirement of success, perhaps Usmanov expected Arsenal fans to be singing songs in celebration of his arrival. It has not quite happened that way. Instead, there have been banners at the Emirates Stadium proclaiming "Love Arsenal - Hate Usmanov" and "Sod Off Jabba", his new nickname in north London.
He has been forced to fend off accusations that he is a gangster and a racketeer. Far, far worse allegations have been swirling around the blogosphere. And the club's board has engineered a so-called lock-down of shares, to prevent any more falling into his hands for the next five years.
"He's certainly not an open book," said the club's chairman, Peter Hill-Wood. "Business is murky in Uzbekistan, and that in itself is an argument against him being involved in Arsenal. I wouldn't want him to be the owner of the club."
Who then is this man who has emerged as if from nowhere to capture a sizeable stake in one of the great clubs of England? Why did he spend six years in jail in the 1980s? What are his links with President Vladimir Putin? How did he make his billions? And why is he buying into the Premier League?
The first time many journalists heard Usmanov's name was when Schillings, a firm of libel law specialists which prides itself on a reputation for ruthlessness, fired off a letter to every major media organisation in Britain, announcing that their client had purchased his first tranche of Arsenal shares and warning against any "defamatory statements or invasions of his privacy".
Schillings were concerned about what they described as "a matter of historical record". Their client had been "imprisoned for various offences under the old Soviet regime", they wrote. "Our client did not commit any of the offences of which he was charged. Our client was fully pardoned after President Mikhail Gorbachev took office. All references to these matters have now been expunged from police records."
To ensure the picture was quite clear, a member of staff at a public relations firm also hired by Usmanov was quoted in one national newspaper as saying: "As a young man he was outspoken about the old Soviet regime - he was sent to jail as a political prisoner."
The Guardian has uncovered evidence that may support Usmanov's complaint that he was framed when he was jailed in 1980. But Schillings' statement that their client was pardoned "after Mikhail Gorbachev took office" is misleading.
The Guardian made inquiries in Russia, Uzbekistan, the UK and the United States to find out more, and also found itself engaged in an email exchange with the businessman himself, in which he denied reports in the Moscow press that he had once been convicted of rape, dismissed a Euro MP's insinuation that he was involved in the death of a journalist in Moscow earlier this year, and wrote candidly about his relationship with an alleged drug trafficker and his close contacts with former members of the KGB.
Alisher Burkhanovich Usmanov was born in September 1953 in a small spa town in what was then the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. His father was a state prosecutor in the capital, Tashkent, enjoying a privileged position among the social and political elite of the region.
As a young man, Usmanov was an accomplished sabre fencer, competing with the Uzbek republic team, and met his future wife, Irina Viner, now an Olympic gymnastics coach, at a gym in Tashkent. "Alisher was a modest young man and was too timid to approach me at first," she said recently. "Now he is a completely changed man: he is very resolute."
He studied at the Moscow State Institute for International Relations, a university renowned in Soviet days for churning out diplomats and spooks and the odd foreign correspondent. It was here that he forged many of the alliances that would assist his extraordinarily successful post-Soviet business career, friendships with people like Sergey Yastrzhembsky, former press attache for Boris Yeltsin and aide to Putin.
On graduating he returned to Tashkent, where he was appointed director of the Foreign Economic Association of the Soviet Peace Committee. This is an intriguing detail of his CV, as it is now widely suspected that the Peace Committee was a front for the KGB.
There have been several other occasions when Usmanov can be seen to have enjoyed close connections with members of Russia's intelligence community. His friends include Yevgeny Primakov, who was the director of Russia's foreign intelligence service, the SVR, before being appointed prime minister. For a couple of years he was first deputy chairman of a financial institution called the MAPO bank, once described as "the spies' bank" because of its links with Russian intelligence agencies.
In his email, Usmanov described questions about the Soviet Peace Committee as being "based on misinformation", and added that he has never served in the KGB, or any other Russian or Uzbek intelligence agency.
Asked about his close associations with former KGB officers, he said: "You are trying to turn the acquaintance of any Russian with members of the KGB into a crime. This is simply not appropriate."
Then, in August 1980, came the prosecution that prompted Schillings' warnings. Usmanov and a co-defendant, Bakhodir Nasimov, the son of the deputy head of the Uzbek KGB, were brought before a military tribunal in Uzbekistan, accused of fraud and embezzlement.
Usmanov has said recently that he was the victim of a power-struggle within the local KGB, and that he was tricked into accepting a bribe. "Nasimov was sent on a covert operation," he said. "His bosses told him he was to accept a bribe from a guy involved in contraband so as to catch him red-handed. The point was to prosecute him for bribery. Nasimov told me that since the guy knew we were friends he might try to pass me the money. 'If he does - take it,' he told me, 'and bring it to me'."
Usmanov was jailed for eight years, and released two years early in March 1986 after expressing his "sincere repentance". This, he says, was "common judicial practice in the USSR".
According to several Russian news reports, Usmanov was convicted not only of financial crimes, but also of rape. Lawyers representing him in Moscow threatened libel proceedings against at least one news website which published this allegation, and in September Schillings took action to remove a similar allegation from the website of Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan.
Murray's internet service provider deactivated the site, an act which inadvertently shut down several other blogs. One of the victims was Boris Johnson, the Tory MP, who complained loudly: "This is London, not Uzbekistan."
Schillings' efforts backfired: bloggers across the globe expressed outrage, and spawned a debate about freedom of speech in which the rape allegation was repeated ad nauseam. Today it is impossible to Google Usmanov's name without the allegation leaping out.
Asked about this by the Guardian, he replied: "All the charges in my case were fabricated. I will give you a copy of the verdict if you need to know what were the crimes I was charged with and you'll see that rape is not one of them. This is a mean lie spread by small-minded people who were naive to think that I was their competitor."
The Guardian has seen no credible evidence that supports this claim against Usmanov. Far from objecting if we reported on the allegation, however, Usmanov insisted that we publish his response.
His convictions were eventually overturned by the supreme court in Tashkent in July 2000. Gorbachev had left office almost nine years earlier, so the pardon clearly had nothing to do with him.
Usmanov's return to court may, however, have had everything to do with a report in the Observer 18 months earlier. The newspaper disclosed that he had broken the rules of the London Stock Exchange by failing to declare his conviction on appointment to the board of Dominion Energy, an oil company, in April 1997.
Lord Owen, the former foreign secretary who chaired a company which controlled Dominion at the time of Usmanov's appointment, told the newspaper that Usmanov had informed him that the charges would be annulled by the president of Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov.
Usmanov's PR people deny any connection between the Observer article and the steps that he took to secure his pardon.
Usmanov's release coincided with the first days of perestroika, and soon he was back in Moscow, setting up a plastic bags business, with a KGB officer as his partner and Olga, the first wife of Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich, as an employee. In a land where advertising barely existed, consumers pounced on any bags printed with the logos of western brands, and Usmanov was on his way to his first fortune.
He also developed a number of banking interests before tapping into the real source of wealth in Russia - its natural resources - acquiring steel, timber and mining concerns. Today he is the 142nd richest man in the world, according to Forbes magazine.
As well as heading Metalloinvest, he is general director of Gazprominvestholding, an investment subsidiary of Russia's gas monopoly, Gazprom, and also owns Kommersant, a business newspaper. In 2003 he began investing in Corus, the Anglo-Dutch steelmaker, eventually acquiring 13.5% before selling his stock.
Over the years, Usmanov has been dogged by allegations that he is a less-than-legitimate businessman, and that he has connections with Russian and Uzbek criminals. In particular, questions have been asked about Gafur Rakhimov, a man who has repeatedly been named as an Uzbek mafia boss and who was once banned from entering Australia because of his alleged connections to organised crime.
Last September, Tom Wise, an MEP with the UK Independence party, took advantage of the protection that parliamentary debates enjoy from libel actions to attack Usmanov during a debate in the European parliament. "Allegedly a gangster and racketeer, he served a six-year jail sentence in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, his eventual pardon coming at the behest of Uzbek mafia chief and heroin overlord Gafur Rakhimov, described as Usmanov's mentor," Wise said.
In the past, Usmanov has admitted to having known Rakhimov for 20 years, and says he has twice asked him about the allegations that he is a heroin trafficker, but says the claims are untrue. In his email to the Guardian he added: "I only knew him since he was a neighbour of my parents. I have never had, nor do I have business dealings with him."
He also addressed another allegation levelled by Wise, that he was in some way connected with the death of Ivan Safronov, a defence correspondent for Kommersant, who plunged to his death from the fifth floor of his Moscow apartment building in March.
Wise admits he has no evidence to support this claim, and Usmanov says: "The Safronov allegation is a startling and unbelievable insinuation with no basis in truth. I consider any insinuation on this as an untruth of a highly provocative nature."
In recent weeks, Usmanov has sought to distance himself from Uzbekistan, the country of his birth, which is widely regarded as having one of the world's worst human rights records. In his email to the Guardian, Usmanov was adamant that he did no business in Uzbekistan, and had no relationship whatsoever with Karimov. "I have no business in Uzbekistan, and I have never had any," he said. "The decision on my complete discharge was taken by the supreme court, not by the president. I have no relationship with President Karimov."
Given Usmanov's background, some in football have puzzled over his reasons for such a high-profile investment in Arsenal. He says he has been a fan for many years, but few at the club's Emirates Stadium will be impressed by his claim that he "fell in love with the game in 1966 when the British [sic] team won against the Germans", or by his admission that he considered buying into north London rivals Spurs.
In Moscow, many assume his decision is in some way connected with his relationship with the Kremlin. Usmanov is said to be close to Putin and he appears, in recent months, to have gone to extravagant lengths to remain so. Last month he paid around £35m for the art collection of the late cellist Mstislav Rostropovich before it was due to go under the hammer at Sotheby's in London. He then donated the entire collection to the Russian Presidential Administration. He also paid a reported £2.5m for the rights to classic Soviet-era cartoons. They were handed over to a children's television channel, one that had just been set up by Putin.
Perhaps such largesse is rooted in the insecurity that must be the lot of many Russian business leaders since Putin rounded against the oligarchy early in his presidency. Perhaps Usmanov believes that were he to take control of Arsenal, any attempt by the Kremlin to move against him would bring protests in London. Perhaps the club presents Usmanov with an opportunity to hedge his bets against any sudden decline in his fortunes in the volatile world of Russian public life.
He would not be alone, if such vicissitudes have played upon his mind. Down the road at Chelsea FC, Abramovich was asked a few months ago whether he felt scared on hearing of the arrest of the oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once one of the richest men on the planet.
"There's a Russian saying," Abramovich said, after thinking for a while. "'You're never safe from prison and poverty.'"
A brief history
· Alisher Usmanov is worth £2.7bn and is ranked by Forbes magazine as the 142nd richest man in the world
· He has a Tudor mansion and 300 acres in Surrey
· Metalloinvest, his mining and steel company, is based in Moscow
· He competed for the Uzbek fencing team and is president of the European Fencing Federation
· He studied at the Moscow State Institute for International Relations - known for producing diplomats and spies
· His first job after graduation was as director of the Foreign Economic Association of the Soviet Peace Committee in Tashkent
Between 1980 and 1986 he was in jail for financial crimes. He has denied reports he was charged with rape. The convictions were overturned in 2000.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/nov/19/football.russia
Alisher Usmanov
Beneath I post some general info taken from wikipededia, and also an article from the Guardian in 2007 when allegations of corruption, sexual violence, raketeering, and connections to the Russian mob, the KGB and Vladamir Putin were put to him.
Alisher Burkhanovich Usmanov (Uzbek: Alisher Usmonov, Алишер Бурханович Усмонов) (born 9 September 1953) is an Uzbek-born Russian business magnate. According to the 2011 edition of Forbes magazine, the oligarch Usmanov is Russia's richest man, with a fortune estimated at $18.1 billion, and the world's 28th richest person.[1] According to the December 2012 Bloomberg Billionaires Index, he has an estimated net worth of $17.3 billion, making him the 39th richest person in the world.[4] In April 2013, the Sunday Times listed him as the richest person in the UK, ousting Lakshmi Mittal for the number one spot. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alisher_Usmanov
With a fortune estimated at around £2.7bn, somewhat more than the annual GDP of Nicaragua or Haiti, Alisher Usmanov is one of the world's wealthiest men. He sits on the board of trustees of the Bolshoi Theatre, is president of the European Fencing Federation and is a founder of an arts and sporting charity.
One of his homes is an exquisite Tudor manor house set in 300 acres of Surrey countryside, while his offices at the Moscow headquarters of Metalloinvest, his mining and steel company, have all the trappings one might expect of one of the city's most successful entrepreneurs: elaborate security, tapestries and gold leaf trimmings, enormous screens flickering with the latest stock prices and a desk that seems to stretch forever.
Last August, the Uzbek-born businessman declared himself a fan of English football, and of Arsenal in particular. He bought 14.58% of the club's shares, and the following month increased that stake to 23%, worth £120m, making him the club's second-largest shareholder. Few in football, or the City, doubt that he would dearly love to take complete control.
It being an immutable rule of the modern game that a vast sum of cash is the first requirement of success, perhaps Usmanov expected Arsenal fans to be singing songs in celebration of his arrival. It has not quite happened that way. Instead, there have been banners at the Emirates Stadium proclaiming "Love Arsenal - Hate Usmanov" and "Sod Off Jabba", his new nickname in north London.
He has been forced to fend off accusations that he is a gangster and a racketeer. Far, far worse allegations have been swirling around the blogosphere. And the club's board has engineered a so-called lock-down of shares, to prevent any more falling into his hands for the next five years.
"He's certainly not an open book," said the club's chairman, Peter Hill-Wood. "Business is murky in Uzbekistan, and that in itself is an argument against him being involved in Arsenal. I wouldn't want him to be the owner of the club."
Who then is this man who has emerged as if from nowhere to capture a sizeable stake in one of the great clubs of England? Why did he spend six years in jail in the 1980s? What are his links with President Vladimir Putin? How did he make his billions? And why is he buying into the Premier League?
The first time many journalists heard Usmanov's name was when Schillings, a firm of libel law specialists which prides itself on a reputation for ruthlessness, fired off a letter to every major media organisation in Britain, announcing that their client had purchased his first tranche of Arsenal shares and warning against any "defamatory statements or invasions of his privacy".
Schillings were concerned about what they described as "a matter of historical record". Their client had been "imprisoned for various offences under the old Soviet regime", they wrote. "Our client did not commit any of the offences of which he was charged. Our client was fully pardoned after President Mikhail Gorbachev took office. All references to these matters have now been expunged from police records."
To ensure the picture was quite clear, a member of staff at a public relations firm also hired by Usmanov was quoted in one national newspaper as saying: "As a young man he was outspoken about the old Soviet regime - he was sent to jail as a political prisoner."
The Guardian has uncovered evidence that may support Usmanov's complaint that he was framed when he was jailed in 1980. But Schillings' statement that their client was pardoned "after Mikhail Gorbachev took office" is misleading.
The Guardian made inquiries in Russia, Uzbekistan, the UK and the United States to find out more, and also found itself engaged in an email exchange with the businessman himself, in which he denied reports in the Moscow press that he had once been convicted of rape, dismissed a Euro MP's insinuation that he was involved in the death of a journalist in Moscow earlier this year, and wrote candidly about his relationship with an alleged drug trafficker and his close contacts with former members of the KGB.
Alisher Burkhanovich Usmanov was born in September 1953 in a small spa town in what was then the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. His father was a state prosecutor in the capital, Tashkent, enjoying a privileged position among the social and political elite of the region.
As a young man, Usmanov was an accomplished sabre fencer, competing with the Uzbek republic team, and met his future wife, Irina Viner, now an Olympic gymnastics coach, at a gym in Tashkent. "Alisher was a modest young man and was too timid to approach me at first," she said recently. "Now he is a completely changed man: he is very resolute."
He studied at the Moscow State Institute for International Relations, a university renowned in Soviet days for churning out diplomats and spooks and the odd foreign correspondent. It was here that he forged many of the alliances that would assist his extraordinarily successful post-Soviet business career, friendships with people like Sergey Yastrzhembsky, former press attache for Boris Yeltsin and aide to Putin.
On graduating he returned to Tashkent, where he was appointed director of the Foreign Economic Association of the Soviet Peace Committee. This is an intriguing detail of his CV, as it is now widely suspected that the Peace Committee was a front for the KGB.
There have been several other occasions when Usmanov can be seen to have enjoyed close connections with members of Russia's intelligence community. His friends include Yevgeny Primakov, who was the director of Russia's foreign intelligence service, the SVR, before being appointed prime minister. For a couple of years he was first deputy chairman of a financial institution called the MAPO bank, once described as "the spies' bank" because of its links with Russian intelligence agencies.
In his email, Usmanov described questions about the Soviet Peace Committee as being "based on misinformation", and added that he has never served in the KGB, or any other Russian or Uzbek intelligence agency.
Asked about his close associations with former KGB officers, he said: "You are trying to turn the acquaintance of any Russian with members of the KGB into a crime. This is simply not appropriate."
Then, in August 1980, came the prosecution that prompted Schillings' warnings. Usmanov and a co-defendant, Bakhodir Nasimov, the son of the deputy head of the Uzbek KGB, were brought before a military tribunal in Uzbekistan, accused of fraud and embezzlement.
Usmanov has said recently that he was the victim of a power-struggle within the local KGB, and that he was tricked into accepting a bribe. "Nasimov was sent on a covert operation," he said. "His bosses told him he was to accept a bribe from a guy involved in contraband so as to catch him red-handed. The point was to prosecute him for bribery. Nasimov told me that since the guy knew we were friends he might try to pass me the money. 'If he does - take it,' he told me, 'and bring it to me'."
Usmanov was jailed for eight years, and released two years early in March 1986 after expressing his "sincere repentance". This, he says, was "common judicial practice in the USSR".
According to several Russian news reports, Usmanov was convicted not only of financial crimes, but also of rape. Lawyers representing him in Moscow threatened libel proceedings against at least one news website which published this allegation, and in September Schillings took action to remove a similar allegation from the website of Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan.
Murray's internet service provider deactivated the site, an act which inadvertently shut down several other blogs. One of the victims was Boris Johnson, the Tory MP, who complained loudly: "This is London, not Uzbekistan."
Schillings' efforts backfired: bloggers across the globe expressed outrage, and spawned a debate about freedom of speech in which the rape allegation was repeated ad nauseam. Today it is impossible to Google Usmanov's name without the allegation leaping out.
Asked about this by the Guardian, he replied: "All the charges in my case were fabricated. I will give you a copy of the verdict if you need to know what were the crimes I was charged with and you'll see that rape is not one of them. This is a mean lie spread by small-minded people who were naive to think that I was their competitor."
The Guardian has seen no credible evidence that supports this claim against Usmanov. Far from objecting if we reported on the allegation, however, Usmanov insisted that we publish his response.
His convictions were eventually overturned by the supreme court in Tashkent in July 2000. Gorbachev had left office almost nine years earlier, so the pardon clearly had nothing to do with him.
Usmanov's return to court may, however, have had everything to do with a report in the Observer 18 months earlier. The newspaper disclosed that he had broken the rules of the London Stock Exchange by failing to declare his conviction on appointment to the board of Dominion Energy, an oil company, in April 1997.
Lord Owen, the former foreign secretary who chaired a company which controlled Dominion at the time of Usmanov's appointment, told the newspaper that Usmanov had informed him that the charges would be annulled by the president of Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov.
Usmanov's PR people deny any connection between the Observer article and the steps that he took to secure his pardon.
Usmanov's release coincided with the first days of perestroika, and soon he was back in Moscow, setting up a plastic bags business, with a KGB officer as his partner and Olga, the first wife of Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich, as an employee. In a land where advertising barely existed, consumers pounced on any bags printed with the logos of western brands, and Usmanov was on his way to his first fortune.
He also developed a number of banking interests before tapping into the real source of wealth in Russia - its natural resources - acquiring steel, timber and mining concerns. Today he is the 142nd richest man in the world, according to Forbes magazine.
As well as heading Metalloinvest, he is general director of Gazprominvestholding, an investment subsidiary of Russia's gas monopoly, Gazprom, and also owns Kommersant, a business newspaper. In 2003 he began investing in Corus, the Anglo-Dutch steelmaker, eventually acquiring 13.5% before selling his stock.
Over the years, Usmanov has been dogged by allegations that he is a less-than-legitimate businessman, and that he has connections with Russian and Uzbek criminals. In particular, questions have been asked about Gafur Rakhimov, a man who has repeatedly been named as an Uzbek mafia boss and who was once banned from entering Australia because of his alleged connections to organised crime.
Last September, Tom Wise, an MEP with the UK Independence party, took advantage of the protection that parliamentary debates enjoy from libel actions to attack Usmanov during a debate in the European parliament. "Allegedly a gangster and racketeer, he served a six-year jail sentence in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, his eventual pardon coming at the behest of Uzbek mafia chief and heroin overlord Gafur Rakhimov, described as Usmanov's mentor," Wise said.
In the past, Usmanov has admitted to having known Rakhimov for 20 years, and says he has twice asked him about the allegations that he is a heroin trafficker, but says the claims are untrue. In his email to the Guardian he added: "I only knew him since he was a neighbour of my parents. I have never had, nor do I have business dealings with him."
He also addressed another allegation levelled by Wise, that he was in some way connected with the death of Ivan Safronov, a defence correspondent for Kommersant, who plunged to his death from the fifth floor of his Moscow apartment building in March.
Wise admits he has no evidence to support this claim, and Usmanov says: "The Safronov allegation is a startling and unbelievable insinuation with no basis in truth. I consider any insinuation on this as an untruth of a highly provocative nature."
In recent weeks, Usmanov has sought to distance himself from Uzbekistan, the country of his birth, which is widely regarded as having one of the world's worst human rights records. In his email to the Guardian, Usmanov was adamant that he did no business in Uzbekistan, and had no relationship whatsoever with Karimov. "I have no business in Uzbekistan, and I have never had any," he said. "The decision on my complete discharge was taken by the supreme court, not by the president. I have no relationship with President Karimov."
Given Usmanov's background, some in football have puzzled over his reasons for such a high-profile investment in Arsenal. He says he has been a fan for many years, but few at the club's Emirates Stadium will be impressed by his claim that he "fell in love with the game in 1966 when the British [sic] team won against the Germans", or by his admission that he considered buying into north London rivals Spurs.
In Moscow, many assume his decision is in some way connected with his relationship with the Kremlin. Usmanov is said to be close to Putin and he appears, in recent months, to have gone to extravagant lengths to remain so. Last month he paid around £35m for the art collection of the late cellist Mstislav Rostropovich before it was due to go under the hammer at Sotheby's in London. He then donated the entire collection to the Russian Presidential Administration. He also paid a reported £2.5m for the rights to classic Soviet-era cartoons. They were handed over to a children's television channel, one that had just been set up by Putin.
Perhaps such largesse is rooted in the insecurity that must be the lot of many Russian business leaders since Putin rounded against the oligarchy early in his presidency. Perhaps Usmanov believes that were he to take control of Arsenal, any attempt by the Kremlin to move against him would bring protests in London. Perhaps the club presents Usmanov with an opportunity to hedge his bets against any sudden decline in his fortunes in the volatile world of Russian public life.
He would not be alone, if such vicissitudes have played upon his mind. Down the road at Chelsea FC, Abramovich was asked a few months ago whether he felt scared on hearing of the arrest of the oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once one of the richest men on the planet.
"There's a Russian saying," Abramovich said, after thinking for a while. "'You're never safe from prison and poverty.'"
A brief history
· Alisher Usmanov is worth £2.7bn and is ranked by Forbes magazine as the 142nd richest man in the world
· He has a Tudor mansion and 300 acres in Surrey
· Metalloinvest, his mining and steel company, is based in Moscow
· He competed for the Uzbek fencing team and is president of the European Fencing Federation
· He studied at the Moscow State Institute for International Relations - known for producing diplomats and spies
· His first job after graduation was as director of the Foreign Economic Association of the Soviet Peace Committee in Tashkent
Between 1980 and 1986 he was in jail for financial crimes. He has denied reports he was charged with rape. The convictions were overturned in 2000.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/nov/19/football.russia
