I’m sure Hollywood will make a film about this; it’s full of intrigue, red herrings, outlandish personalities and a dead dog. They can even nick my title if they want, reminiscent of the Olivier/Monroe classic The Prince and the Showgirl.
The storyline is about BoJo forcing through a Lordship for one of his Russian oligarch chums in 2020. It’s topical on many fronts – BoJo bashing, oligarch bashing, unelected-upper-house bashing. I sense I’m supposed to find BoJo guilty on all counts – cronyism, security-breaching, hypocrisy, elitism, another party-gate (he enjoyed Olly-Oligarch’s hospitality) – but as evidenced in my previous blogs, while I can admit to BoJo’s failings, I can’t help but forgive him because the lovable rogue got Brexit done.
I have the same forgiving attitude towards Jacob Rees-Mogg, but on one issue I didn’t have to forgive him because he hadn’t done anything wrong. He had been accused of dodging tax by registering a business in the Caymen Islands. His Limited Liability Partnership did indeed make a whopping great profit and paid no corporation tax. That’s because any such liability is assessable directly on an LLP’s members, and as Moggy is a British resident, he pays British tax into British coffers at British rates on his worldwide income and gains, including his LLP profits.
So if I dig deep enough, will I find that Olly Oligarch was deserving of a Lordship without BoJo doing anything wrong? I have to admit, helping out a supposed enemy of the state is a much more serious issue than legally dodging tax (which we’ve just established Moggy didn’t do anyway) or quaffing wine and cake with a few workmates on your birthday during lockdown. So I’ll set the bar a bit higher.
Firstly – who exactly is Olly? According to Wiki, he’s Evgeny Alexandrovich Lebedev, born in Moscow in 1980, a dual-national businessman. He inherited his wealth from his father, Alexander Lebedev, a Russian banker and former officer of the First Chief Directorate of the USSR's KGB and later its successor, the SVR.
In 2009 Evgeny and his father bought a 65% share in the Evening Standard. They turned it into a free newspaper and circulation tripled immediately to 700,000. In 2010, he bought The Independent and The Independent on Sunday and, soon after, launched the i newspaper, the first new national daily since 1986, at a time of falling circulations and title closures worldwide.
In 2016, it was announced that the i had been sold, and that The Independent would become digital-only. In 2019 Lebedev sold a stake of his companies to a private Saudi investor. After a second regulator concluded no investigation was necessary, Ofcom judged that the sale had not led to "any influence" on the news outlets under the Russky’s control.
Charitable Concerns
Lebedev is the patron of the Evening Standard's Dispossessed Fund, which helps to address poverty in London, and has raised over £13m since its launch in 2010. In 2018, he launched #AIDSFree, a cross-title campaign between The Independent and Evening Standard to raise money for the Elton John AIDS Foundation. In 2019, he announced that both newspapers would launch a multiple-year campaign to tackle homelessness in London and around the world.
Since the first Covid lockdown, Lebedev's news titles appealed in partnership with food surplus charity The Felix Project to supply food to vulnerable people, frontline charities and NHS hospitals. In December 2020, the 'Food for London Now' appeal announced that it had surpassed its £10 million target and delivered 20 million meals.
Olly and BoJo
The Evening Standard supported BoJo’s re-election bid to remain Mayor of London in 2012 and, in 2020, Bojo returned the favour and nominated Lebedev for a life peerage. The security services warned that this posed a national security risk, but the Cabinet Office pushed it through anyway and we now have Baron Lebedev of Hampton in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames and of Siberia in the Russian Federation.
All the above is on Wikipedia, pretty bland apart from the last paragraph. What follows I took from bylinetimes.com and here’s where it gets Hollywood-ish.
Politics and Putin
Lebedev’s father was the senior KGB spy in London in 1988 and “is a pro-Kremlin oligarch” with interests in Russia. He is a “noted supporter of the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, and his illegal annexation of Crimea.” Bylines claims that no one can simply ‘retire’ from the KGB and that father and son never openly criticise Putin. Really?
Bylines continues that after his stint at the KGB, Lebedev senior bought the National Reserve Bank in Russia and his net worth was estimated at $3 billion in 2008. But then one of his newspapers ran a story about Putin dating a ballerina when he was still officially married, and his bank was “hollowed out” and shares sold at knockdown rates. That’s why they had to sell a chunk of their newspaper empire to the Saudis the following year. Lebedev snr is no longer considered a billionaire.
I would say that was tantamount to ‘being retired’ from the KGB.
Further, the Lebedevs own a chunk of Novaya Gazeta, a regime-critical newspaper (founded by Lebedev senior and Mikhail Gorbachev), several of whose journalists have died in mysterious circumstances.
Bylines.com made much of Lebedev senior supporting Putin’s annexation of Crimea, claiming this as evidence that he’s a Putin sycophant. I could argue just as legitimately that he was cynically looking after his business interests – he owns a Crimean hotel complex. Is he a Putin-ite, an astute businessman or a coward? The jury’s out.
Note that this section is mostly entirely about the father. I couldn’t find much about the son, apart from a report by openDemocracy that, in 2018, his dog died in mysterious circumstances (poisoned) and he believed it to be a message from Moscow.
Most recently, (28 February 2022) Evgeny wrote a personal plea in the Evening Standard for Putin to end the war in Ukraine: “As a Russian citizen I plead with you to stop Russians killing their Ukrainian brothers and sisters.” The least he can expect is a horse’s head at the foot of his bed.
Bringing it all together
Before I condemn BoJo to trial by The Guardian, I have a few questions that I don’t think are going to be answered any time soon:
- What evidence did the security forces have that Evgeny was a security risk? Was it: A smoking gun? Circumstantial? By association? Anecdotal? Law of probabilities?
- Was the potential danger from Evgeny direct or because he was considered a blackmail risk?
- Why did the security services rescind their earlier warnings about Evgeny becoming a Lord?
Having said that, can we please park it in the get-some-perspective carpark for now and focus on getting more visas to Ukrainian refugees?
When the inquiry does get going, I expect BoJo won’t come out of it smelling of roses, and I’ll be first in line to give him a kicking.
Unless he gets Peace in Ukraine done; in which case I’ll forgive him all over again.
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