Russian bank chief given UK asylum

©Bloomberg

Andrei Borodin, a fugitive Russian bank chairman granted political asylum in the UK, has claimed he was persecuted by the Kremlin and called on the international community to stop dealing with Russia until it reforms its legal system.

In his first UK interview since receiving asylum in February, Mr Borodin, 45, said he was only safe in Britain after alleging he was pressured to sell his stake in a bank he founded, Bank of Moscow, as part of a state asset grab.

Russian authorities have requested an international arrest warrant for Mr Borodin via Interpol to answer fraud charges – which he says were politically motivated.

“It was not prosecution, but persecution,” Mr Borodin said.

The ex-banker joins a growing band of Russians granted asylum in the UK, straining ties with Moscow. The news comes in the same week a coroner in the inquest of Alexander Litvinenko – the former KGB officer who died of radioactive poisoning in 2006 – ruled he would hear some evidence in private.

The press secretary for Russian premier Dmitry Medvedev insisted Mr Borodin faced “ordinary criminal” charges.

“The practice of obtaining political asylum, especially in England, has been reduced to the point where it’s not important what the applicant has done ...” she said. “The main thing is to declare as loudly as possible that it’s political persecution.”

The Home Office declined to comment.

Unlike other Russian exiles such as Boris Berezovsky, Mr Borodin arrives without an entourage. He is softly-spoken and dressed in the subtly-expensive casual wardrobe of the commuter-belt banker.

His Henley-on-Thames house is, however, grander than the average banker’s residence: he bought the 300-year-old Park Place for a reported £140m in 2011, though a portion of his billion-dollar fortune remains frozen in Switzerland.

Much of his time since fleeing Russia in 2011 has been spent in his solicitors’ offices at BCL Burton Copeland.

“When you’re in a situation like mine, all your day-to-day is to meet your lawyers, to read their notes and documents,” he says. “It is my full-time job.”

He hopes to return to banking and finance, after first working at Dresdner Bank, then setting up a city-controlled bank at the request of his next boss, Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov, in 1995. It became Russia’s fifth-biggest.

After Mr Luzhkov fell out of favour and was controversially sacked by Mr Medvedev in 2010, however, Mr Borodin alleges he had to sell his bank stake as part of moves to bring it under Kremlin control.

Bank of Moscow was then taken over by VTB, the state-controlled number two bank. But VTB in July 2011 received a $14bn bailout after saying it had found a multibillion-dollar “hole” in Bank of Moscow’s accounts.

Mr Borodin has alleged there was no hole in the accounts, but the bailout instead covered problems with VTB’s accounts, or allowed assets to be siphoned off. His calls for Russian prosecutors to investigate the bailout are, he speculates, the reason he remains a public enemy.

“That’s why I’m still the threat for them,” he says. “What I and my Russian lawyers are saying is that the funds VTB paid to the City of Moscow did not reach the treasury of the city.”

VTB said on Friday the bailout was essential to prevent Bank of Moscow from “collapsing as a result of years of deliberate mismanagement by the previous management team”.

“Actions of the former Bank of Moscow management caused significant losses within the bank” which were reported by regulators and independent auditors Deloitte & Touche, it said. Bank of Moscow had filed 54 claims to law enforcement authorities totalling more than Rbs210bn ($6.85bn), and would seek damages.

Though Mr Borodin’s ties to Mr Luzhkov are at the heart of his claims that the Russian state’s case against him is politically motivated, the ex-mayor – ironically – remains in Russia with no charges against him.

Yet the authorities have increased pressure on Mr Borodin in recent months as a TV documentary alleged he was funding an opposition leader plotting to overthrow president Vladimir Putin.

“It’s not my philosophy to prepare and organise revolutions. It’s a completely fabricated story,” Mr Borodin says, though adds that he does financially support “proper” human rights organisations in Russia.

“Politicians are coming and going. But if you have basic awareness of human rights ... that is much more important than relations with the Russian Federation,” he says.