All language subtitles for Once.Upon.a.Time.in.Londongrad.S01E02.WEBRip.x264-ION10

(WOMAN) The world in which
Scot Young and Boris Berezovsky
operated

was kind of like going down
this rabbit hole.

It's a world that exists
under the surface,

with global business deals
and yachts and mansions

and celebrity clubs
and shady criminal figures.

This isn't a world that exists

entirely separately from our world.

And when it crosses over,

it can be potentially lethal.

♪ (TENSE MUSIC BUILDS AND STOPS)

(STATIC)
(RADIO TUNING)

(REPORTER) A murder investigation
is being launched into the death
of another Russian on British soil.

♪ (RUSSIAN HIP HOP PLAYING)
(BIG BEN GONGS)

(WOMAN) He told his uncle
a fortnight before he died,

"If anything happens to me
in the next two weeks,

it won't be an accident."
# (RUSSIAN HIP HOP CONTINUES)

(MAN) London is levitating
on a sea of dirty money.

♪ (HIP HOP CONTINUES)

(MAN) If you deal with somebody
who has
a very suspicious track record,

someday
it will come back to haunt you.

(MUSIC FADES OUT)
(POLICE SIREN WAILS)

(SIREN FADES OUT)

(DIRECTOR) What was your impression
of Boris Berezovsky
when you first met him?

Uh... very mercurial, I will say.

He was never still.
He was always in... on the move.

Fast-speaking.

Fast in, er, understanding.

Very intelligent.

When I met Boris, it was in 1972.

And then I started to work for him.

We spent a lot of time together.

He had some kind of energy
or some power,

that feeling
that he knows what he wants.

But at that time,

we had no idea what could happen.

♪ (STATELY CLASSICAL MUSIC PLAYING)

I was at Boris Berezovsky's
birthday party in 2006.

It was in Blenheim Palace,

♪ (UPTEMPO RUSSIAN MUSIC PLAYING)
with a lot of music,

with a lot of black caviar.

It was beautiful.

Small party...

...Russian style.

♪ (RUSSIAN MUSIC BUILDS)

You know, the interesting thing
about the Russians in London

is they don't like to be seen
together.

But for this party,
it was different.

As part of our investigation,

we obtained some home video footage
of the party

and it's just quite extraordinary
to watch all of these characters
mingling

in, you know, incredible glamour
and luxury.

There was Berezovsky,

Badri Patarkatsishvilli,

Berezovsky's closest associate
and business partner.

There was Andrei Lugovoi.
He'd recently got out of prison

and he'd managed to ingratiate
himself with Berezovsky.

There was Alexander Litvinenko,

the KGB defector who fled to the UK
with Boris Berezovsky's help.

The guest list really was
a who's who

of both, kind of,
Russia's most wanted men,

but also the glitziest and most
glamorous tier of Russian society,

which was now exiled to the UK.

They were really all there,
under one roof,

circulating together, enjoying
themselves on the dance floor,

sipping brandy, puffing on cigars.

And then we noticed...

(TAPE WHIRRS)

...that also present
was Scot Young.

(TAPE WHIRRS)

We knew there was a connection
between Scot and Boris,

but this video footage of the party

showed that Scot Young
was connected

to a number of politically exposed
Russians who'd fled to the UK

and it seemed like there was
a very strong Russian connection
to Scot Young.

That rang real alarm bells for us.
How could that be explained?

(GLASS DINGS)
(APPLAUSE)

(SPEAKS RUSSIAN)

♪ (EERIE MUSIC PLAYING)

In the '90s, in Russia,

there was lots of corruption

and links with organised crime.

It was a very unsettled time.

The barricades aren't coming down
yet. They say they'll remain

in place until the ideal
of democracy in Russia

is fully out of danger.
Martin Sixsmith, BBC News, Moscow.

I was the BBC's Moscow correspondent

starting in 1988.

At the time, Russia was
a very dodgy, criminal place.

The big step forward was 1991
when the Soviet Union collapsed.

At the time, Russia was led
by Boris Yeltsin.

His agenda was shaped
by the attitude he'd adopted

towards the communist system.

Overnight, he did away with
the old Soviet system

and introduced
the basic tenets of capitalism.

As Russia moved into
its new capitalist economy,

Boris Yeltsin sold off all of
the assets which had been
state-owned,

including the country's
oil and mineral concerns,

all of its media businesses.

Cronies of Boris Yeltsin
were able to come along

and buy up gigantic companies
for rock-bottom prices

and became billionaires overnight.

♪ (ELECTRONIC DANCE MUSIC PLAYING)

You get what was called
cowboy capitalism in Russia

and we started to see
the oligarchs rise to prominence.

What is an oligarch?

It's a very rich man
who uses his riches

for political influence.

I know some of them personally.
I grew up with them.

Some of them have been to prison.

They were in the right place
at the right time.

They've taken over state assets,
basically paying them nothing.

Before you know it,
you've got someone who's gone from
regular citizen in a communist state

to a global billionaire.

And not just any global billionaire,

a global billionaire
with potentially
a very mucky history, you know?

(MUSIC FADES)

When we began investigating this,
we were looking into the death
of Scot Young.

But it became increasingly clear
to us

as we looked into our documents
that Berezovsky was the true centre
of this story

and if we were going
to understand what had happened,

we needed to understand
Berezovsky's past.

So Boris Berezovsky, like Scot,
is a rags-to-riches story.

Boris, very humble upbringing,
becomes a mathematician.

Really successful, you know?

Then he was in his late forties,
capitalism comes

and the guy became
a veritable Russian tycoon.

Newspapers, airlines,

property, automobile companies,

all the classic accoutrements
of capitalist success,

but, obviously,
with the Russian twist.

He was absolutely honest
and dishonest

at the same time.

He was kind and he was evil.

And then he became one of the most
powerful men in the country.

After 1996,
Berezovsky essentially became

Boris Yeltsin's grey cardinal.

He was the man behind the scenes
in the Kremlin.

He got a few formal state positions,

but his real power
was in the way that he could shape

the decisions
that Yeltsin was taking.

(REPORTER) Prime ministers
come and go,

but Berezovsky survives,
the power behind the throne.

He's on a mission to spread
the creed of capitalism

to those the new Russia
has left behind.

For most Russians,
this was a period of real misery,

of real hardship.
At the same time, though,

a minute fraction of Russians
were becoming obscenely rich,

essentially through rigged auctions
of state assets being privatised.

And Berezovsky took advantage
of the situation.

They believe that I am a person
who is able to give them

not just hope, but the real way

for the future.

♪ (TENSE MUSIC PLAYING)

(DIRECTOR) What were some of
the bureaucratic hurdles
you faced in St. Petersburg?

I know why you are asking this.

You're going to ask
about how I met Mr Putin.

♪ (DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYING)

We had a car dealership,

but we had no documents

for the land
on which it was staying.

Without this document,
we have nothing.

Even with
all the political events,

it was very hard
to get certain documents.

Putin at the time
was a fairly kind of grey

and anonymous bureaucrat
from St. Petersburg

and he was there
as the deputy mayor.

After seven months of fighting
for this piece of paper,

Boris told me that, "You know,
there is one man in St. Petersburg.

You go there, maybe
you'll have lunch together,

explain it to him
and he'll help."

I never heard the name of Putin
before that.

I went to a restaurant.

I started explaining to Putin
the situation with the land.

He listened to me
very attentively,

then went to the window,

spoke for a short time
on his mobile,

and then told me that, "OK.

Go to this person,
you'll get your paper.

Glad to meet you. 'Bye."

I said, "Well, and lunch?"

He said, "No.

You only invited me to lunch.
You didn't invite me

to discuss business.

You start to discuss business,
there will be no lunch.

Glad to meet you," and he left.

In five minutes,
I got the document,

went back to Moscow.

I called Boris. I said,
"Boris, who is this guy?"

And Boris said, "Well, you know,
he's a very special person."

♪ (DRAMATIC MUSIC INTENSIFIES)

(MUSIC STOPS)
(SIRENS WAIL)

Yeltsin was old, he was ill.
He'd had heart attacks.

Berezovsky and the oligarchs
were starting to look

for a transition to a new president

which would not see too much damage

for the guys who'd been involved
in the old presidency.

I approached Boris in '98,

offering him
to write his biography.

Boris knew that he could trust me
and this was a big deal

and I think that's why he allowed,
basically, me to be around.

I became very close with Boris

and he started to take me
with him wherever he would travel.

At one point, he told me

that they found a person

who will become
next president of Russia.

You know, so the story goes,

the oligarchs are looking about
and they're, like,

"Who's someone
who's really, like, pliable?

We want, like, a Mr Nobody,
someone, like, malleable."

And then one of them was, like,

"Well, hows abouts this guy,
Vladimir Putin?

Like, we get him in,
he's a functionary

and he'll do whatever we want."

I was very upset. Oh, of course,
the guy was working for KGB
all his life.

I mean, come on. Aren't there
any other Russians around?

It's a huge country.

I told him that they're making
a major mistake.

For Boris, this is
an issue of personal security.

♪ (DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYING)

Berezovsky thought
that the quid pro quo would be

that he would maintain a close
position within Putin's court,

would be an adviser and really
would be a kind of puppet-master

who could pull the strings
on what he thought
was this faceless bureaucrat,

who he hoped would continue
to do his bidding.

You can imagine how that turned out.

Like, that fucking blew up
in their faces, right?

♪ (GRAND ORCHESTRAL MUSIC PLAYING)

(REPORTER) In Russia today,
the clear winner

of the Russian presidential
election, Vladimir Putin,
began to establish the Putin era.

Putin gets elected as president

and things change incredibly rapidly
after that.

He decided,
"Enough of the old ways.

I'm going to rid myself
of these hangers-on."

And in a very dramatic meeting
in the Kremlin,

he called in all the oligarchs
and he said, "Look.

This is the new way
things are going to be done.

It's not going to be you
pulling the strings anymore.

It's going to be me in charge.

If you want to keep your wealth,
you keep out of politics.

And that means no criticism of me,

no financing other political parties

and acceptance that your days
as the power behind the throne
are over.

And if you sign up to all that,
then we'll get along just fine."

And Berezovsky was the man
who really took this
as a personal affront.

The power struggle
between Berezovsky and Putin

started immediately.

The oligarchs wanted Berezovsky out.

No-one wanted him to be around.

He became a problem.

As an oppositionist,
he was very weak.

Putin, of course, had
the entire system behind him.

Including the FSB.

Berezovsky, he was like a man
in a bar-room fight.

He knows he can't win

and his friends
are all saying to him, "Back off,
back off. It's not worth it."

But he keeps going and he keeps
fighting, because there's something
in the Russian character.

He felt that there was something
more important than wealth.

You know, call it honour,
call it pride,

call it hubris, call it stupidity.

He was like a...
you know, a dog with a bone

and he just wouldn't let go.

♪ (DRAMATIC CHORAL MUSIC PLAYING)

When Vladimir Putin came to power,
he had turned into the strong man

at the centre of power in Russia.

Putin and Berezovsky's relationship
came to a head

when there was a catastrophe
of a Russian nuclear submarine.

It was the terrible tragedy
of the Kursk submarine disaster.

There was a terrible accident,
an explosion inside a torpedo tube.

Sailors were trapped
inside this sunk submarine.

The Russian fleet did not have
the rescue submarines

that could have
possibly taken the crew out.

So they all died.

But what made it even worse

was that Putin
basically played it off

as if it was not that important
and the families of submariners
shouldn't be giving him a hard time.

Berezovsky's network
broadcasted a report.

They were not very complimentary
of Putin.

Putin felt that Berezovsky
had not just let them down,

but had, in some ways,
declared war

by allowing people to highlight

the terrible mismanagement
of this awful situation.

After that point, Putin really
designated Berezovsky an enemy
and started to go after him.

(MUSIC FADES)

There was a time
when I'd see him quite often.

I was gathering material for my book

and it was my idea
to record the conversations.

'Boris Berezovsky, how would
you describe yourself as a person?'

(IN ENGLISH)

The thing I liked
about these recordings is
it was the real Berezovsky.

He wasn't putting on a front
or thinking about
what he was going to say.

He wasn't doing an interview
for television. He was just talking.

Berezovsky was facing
state investigations

of several of his companies.

The FSB was raiding the head offices
of companies he owned,

launching investigations
into his business dealings.

The game became very dangerous
for Berezovsky.

Putin started to claim his power.

Putin warned that oligarchs
who stepped out of line
in the new Russia

would receive a crushing blow
on the head.

Berezovsky was perhaps the first
of the super-rich Russians

who settled in London.

But from the time Berezovsky came,
later on

London became a haven
for Russian big money.

♪ (DRAMATIC CLASSICAL MUSIC PLAYING)

Business tycoons
were siphoning money

out of Russia, because
their money would not be safe.

They have amounts of money

that boggle the mind,
know what I mean?

We're talking
Aladdin's caves of wealth.

It's a very strange environment.
Mostly, they're bored here.

They try to outshine each other.

Who has a bigger car, a bigger
villa, a bigger this, a bigger that?

The reason that so many Russian
dissidents end up in London...

... it's London. It's always been
a permissive city.

Whether you're bringing in
dirty money

or you want to go out
and you want to drink

and do cocaine until seven
in the morning, you can find it
here.

It's one of the easiest places
in the world to move money,

to launder money.
Nobody asks you anything.

The issue is trade relations
between Britain and Russia.

In the past, when Russian
companies want to do an IPO,

when they want to sell their shares,
they're not going to New York
to do it.

In fact, probably
they might not be allowed to.

They're coming to London.
We're talking about trillions
in deals.

So the amounts of money
that underpin all of this are huge.

That's really
at the heart of the issue.

♪ (RUSSIAN CHORAL MUSIC PLAYING)

For Berezovsky in Russia,

money was always
a means to an end.

But he lost much of his money,

I would say between 80 and 90%
of what he had,

in the process of moving to London.

Much of it was expropriated
by the Putin government.

And so he wanted to make money,
obviously.

The British people that hang
around the oligarchs,

it's a cross-section of society.

If you're an oligarch, you want
an accountant for your clean money.

You know you get the person
who costs £2,000 an hour.

But let's say you want to move money
that's less clean.

You know, well, maybe you go
somewhere different.

Maybe you find somebody
who's come up the hard way,

who can act as a fixer
or facilitator.

Someone like Scot Young.

You can understand
why they were close,

cos in many respects
they were birds of a feather.

They were cut from the same cloth.

There are two versions of how
Scot met Boris Berezovsky, OK?

There's the version
that Scot likes to tell, which is

♪ (JAUNTY MUSIC PLAYING)
he turns up
back at his stately home one day.

Michelle runs out and she's, like,

"Scot! There's this weird guy
in the house."

And he walks into the house
and there's
this cannonball-shaped guy

sitting in a chair, who's, like,
"Hey, this is my house now."

Turns out
this guy's Boris Berezovsky.

Within a matter of weeks,
Scot had sold him the house.

But, you know, there's
an alternate history to this.

♪ (DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYING)

You have a lot of documentation
which suggests

that Scot Young
had actually met Berezovsky

several years earlier in Moscow.

Scot had been doing
various favours

and facilitations for people
in Berezovsky's circle
for a number of years.

There were a lot of
private intelligence reports

tracking Scot's relationship
with Boris Berezovsky.

From the earliest days
of Berezovsky's move to the UK,

Scot was his fixer. He was the guy
who, first of all, sold him

the first property that he moved to.

And then Berezovsky
started using him as a front

|to funnel his money
into British properties.

Scot was finding all kinds of ways

to help Berezovsky spend his money
in the UK while he was under
an international arrest warrant

and many of his bank accounts
were suspended.

Scot Young,
he's on his uppers financially.

So he's, like, "I need a deal."
Right?

But he knew
how to turn a penny into a pound.

Like, he still had that knowledge
and he knew the people that
could help him do it.

He's this guy, flees to London

and he needs money.

Obviously, like, they were going
to do something exceptionally crazy.

♪ (DRAMATIC MUSIC INTENSIFIES)

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