Posted on March 10, 2010 - by Venik

Boris Berezovsky wins libel case over Litvinenko murder

Russian oligarch awarded damages over claims he arranged polonium poisoning of friend and former KGB spy

The exiled Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky was today awarded libel damages of £150,000 over “savage” allegations he was behind the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, the poisoned Russian dissident who was his close friend.

In a chaotic high court battle in London, the 64-year-old tycoon successfully argued his reputation had seriously been damaged by a Russian state television broadcast in April 2007.

The programme, available to view for free by satellite in the UK, included an interview with a man who claimed he had been offered £40m by Litvinenko – who was working for Berezovsky until his death – to falsely confess to being a KGB hitman tasked with killing Berezovsky with a poisoned ballpoint pen.

When he refused to take the bribe, the man said, he was drugged and then forced to make a false testimony used to bolster Berezovsky’s asylum application in the UK.

The purpose of this lie-filled testimony, the man said, was to “prove” the oligarch would be in mortal danger if he returned to his homeland.

His evidence was indeed crucial in proving Berezovsky’s political refugee status and he was granted asylum in 2003, the court heard.

In the same programme the presenter suggested that Litvinenko, who died from poisoning with radioactive polonium in London in November 2006, was killed at Berezovsky’s behest because Litvinenko was a witness to Berezovsky’s fraudulent claim for political asylum.

The logic was that Litvinenko would be an important witness for Russian prosecutors investigating allegations that Berezovsky’s asylum was based on lies, and thus Berezovsky wanted him dead – just in case.

Berezovsky claimed he was a victim of “selective editing” after the programme began with a clip of him saying: “If I particularly dislike someone I’ll kill him.” The remark was clearly “ironic or jocular”, said his barrister, Desmond Browne QC.

The oligarch pulled up to court most days during the trial in a blacked-out limousine and sat in court flanked by his security guards.

Giving evidence, he explained why he took action. “I cannot imagine a more offensive and damaging allegation. It would be damaging enough to allege merely that I bribed or drugged a man so as to force him to give false evidence in order to help me secure my asylum status; that I was accused of Sasha’s [Alexander Litvinenko's] murder, and to think people may believe it to be true, was, and still is, deeply upsetting.

“I have been portrayed as a man whom people should fear; this affects my relationships with everyone who is not already a close personal friend.”

In his judgment today, the judge, Mr Justice Eady, said: “I can say unequivocally that there is no evidence before me that Mr Berezovsky had any part in the murder of Mr Litvinenko. Nor, for that matter, do I see any basis for reasonable grounds to suspect him of it.”

Berezovsky, who has an estimated wealth of $1bn (£667m) according to Forbes magazine, told the court that Litvinenko was a dear and loyal friend who had saved his life “on more than one occasion” – chiefly by refusing to assassinate him in 1998 when Litvinenko was a KGB agent.

The grateful Berezovsky then became Litvinenko’s benefactor, arranging his family’s escape to the UK. Once in London he gave Litvinenko a house and thousands of pounds a month in “research grants”.

To back up his case, Berezovsky enlisted a roster of high-profile witnesses including Litvinenko’s widow, Marina.

After Litvinenko fell ill in 2006 after ingesting a radioactive isotope in a London sushi bar, Berezovsky told British journalists that his friend had been poisoned because he was an enemy of the then Russian president, Vladimir Putin.

The two-week trial was almost anarchic at times as officials from the Russian prosecutors’ office repeatedly intervened despite not being party to proceedings. So obvious was their intention that when one of their mobile phones went off in court one day, Browne quipped: “That must be Mr Putin on the line.”

At least three Russian prosecutors were in court each day to assist Vladimir Terluk, the man accused of giving the contentious interview about Berezovsky’s bogus asylum claim. They whispered in Terluk’s ear, passed him notes and smirked or laughed as the evidence was heard.

At one point they asked for the opportunity to cross-examine Berezovsky. “I thought that a step too far,” said Eady in his judgment.

Terluk, a Kazakh who came to the UK to seek asylum in 1999, had been left to defend the libel action alone and without a lawyer after the Russian Television and Radio Company refused to take part.

He denied being “Pyotr”, the man in the offending broadcast, yet maintained that everything Pyotr said was true, including “that [Berezovsky's] associates tried to organised the falsification of the assassination plot with the purpose of obtaining refugee status by Mr Berezovsky and his associates … and the late Mr Litvinenko himself was the one who was trying actively to implement that falsification”.

In his judgment, Eady said: “I have no doubt that Pyotr was indeed Mr Terluk and that he must have known he was being filmed.” But Terluk did not himself accuse Berezovsky of murdering Litvinenko, which was, Eady said, “the overall message conveyed by the programme”.

Moscow has made no secret of its desire to extradite Berezovsky, who has been an outspoken critic of the Kremlin since he fell out with Putin in 2000.

In April 2009 Russian prosecutors charged Berezovsky with “knowingly false denunciation of a involvement in a serious crime” – a charge peculiar to Russian law that relates to the allegedly fabricated evidence in support of his 2003 asylum claim.

One of the Russian prosecutors admitted to the Guardian he hoped Berezovsky would lose the case so his asylum status would be called into question by the Home Office and he would be returned to Russia to face trial.

They were also intent, Eady ruled, on blackening Litinvenko’s character. “He was portrayed as something of a wild man. It was said that he was an unreliable fantasist who was prone to emotional outbursts.” The purpose of this “wholesale attack”, said Eady, was to undermine the credibility of evidence Litvinenko gave in support of Berezovsky’s asylum claim.

Speaking after the judgment, Berezovsky said: “I have no doubt that, in making this programme the purpose of RTR and the Russian authorities was to undermine my asylum status in the UK and to put the investigation of Sasha Litvinenko’s murder on the wrong track. I am pleased that the court, through its judgment, has unequivocally demolished RTR’s claims. I trust the conclusions of the British investigators that the trail leads to Russia and I hope that one day justice will prevail.”

He was not optimistic about the prospect of recovering the £150,000 damages but said: “This was never about money.” Mr justice Eady said in his judgment that “the quanitification of the damages may be academic in the sense that there are likely to be formidable obstacles in recovering the money”.

Berezovsky is no stranger to London’s law courts. In 1997 he sued the US magazine Forbes after it printed an article that asked: “Is he the Godfather of the Kremlin?” He won despite only 2,000 copies of the 785,000 sold worldwide having been purchased in the UK.

That case is often cited as an example of libel tourism – foreigners taking advantage of England’s libel laws, which tend to favour the claimant by putting the burden of proof on the defendant.

In 2008 he began a £2bn legal tussle with another London-based oligarch, Roman Abramovich, over allegations Berezovsky was forced to sell shares in a string of huge Russian state companies. He is currently fighting the widow of his friend and business partner Badri Patarkatsishvili for half of the dead man’s fortune.

Original article

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