Boris Abramovich Berezovsky was born on 23rd Janurary 1946 is a mathematician and is part of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He is most well known for serving under the administration of Boris Yeltsin during the 1990s as a politician and a media tycoon. He was a member of Yeltsin’s inner circle towards the end of his presidency when he served as the deputy secretary of Russia’s Security Council and he was good friends with Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana Dyachenko.
In 1989 he worked for AutoVAZ. In 1992 LogoVAZ was set up which was a joint-stock company with Berezovsky’s AutoVAZ. Over four years it grew to become one of the biggest private enterprises in Russia and in 1994 he was made Chairman of the Board of Directors when LogoVaz was made into a holding company.
He became a billionaire during the period of Russia’s rush to capitalism where he seized state assets for low costs. He became the owner of the Sibneft oil company and was the majority shareholder in ORT, Russia’s foremost television channel which he used to put across propaganda before the presidential election of 1996. Instead of putting in money into the businesses he took over such as Sibneft, ORT, Avtovaz, the Omsk Oil Refinery, Brtsk, Krasnoyarsk, Novokuznetsk and the National Sports Fund, he used all of their profits. He used some of this money to fund Vladimir Putin’s party. Putin took over ORT to stop the political ambitions of people like Berezovsky who were highly disliked by the public in Russia.
When Putin became president Berezovsky fled Russia as he was blamed for making $13 million (US dollars) through fraudulent means from a regional government. He now has political asylum in the UK and has since said he wants to topple Putin “by force”. He has now been linked with Alexander Litvinenko, Akhmed Zakayev and Alex Goldfarb who are known as “the London Circle” [of Russian exiles].
He founded the International Foundation for Civil Liberties in November 2000.
In 2007 a court in Moscow found him guilty of committing massive embezzlement. He has been sentenced to six years jail time and has been instructed to repay $9 million. In addition he has been blamed for the murders of Litvinenko and Anna Politkovskaya who were critics of Putin’s regime.
In 1994 he survived an attempt on his life and he claims there have been numerous other attempts on his life by Russia agents.