Lunch with the FT: Mikhail Fridman - FT.com

Lunch with the FT: Mikhail Fridman - FT.com:

"As I sit with Mikhail Fridman in Frescobaldi, an Italian restaurant in Mayfair, my eyes drift to a quote from Dante’s Divine Comedy painted on the white ceramic tiles behind us: “The devil is not as black as he is painted.”
For years, Fridman was demonised in the western press as a symbol of everything that was wrong with Russian business. He was portrayed as a ruthless tycoon who exploited Russia’s corrupt politics and courts, a billionaire bully who stopped at nothing to defeat competitors and partners alike.
As a reporter in Moscow in the 1990s, I’d witnessed his rise to mogul-dom, as he began to amass a fortune currently estimated by Forbes at $14.6bn. On returning to London, I covered the ins and outs of his war with BP over their jointly-held Russian oil producer TNK-BP — one of the most spectacular corporate battles of the past decade. The company had been subjected to an onslaught of tax, labour and police inspections — all engineered, BP claimed, by Fridman and his partners as part of a furtive power-grab. TNK-BP’s American boss Bob Dudley fled Russia in July 2008, after a campaign of what he called “sustained harassment”."



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