But the Chelsea owner’s mask slips a little in the witness box at the Royal Courts of Justice
“A win,” the smartly dressed woman solicitor exclaims, greeting her client with a broad smile. She is not indicating optimism about the outcome of the case currently being heard on the third floor of the Rolls Building in London’s Royal Courts of Justice. She means the result of the weekend’s Premier League match involving the client’s football team: Blackburn Rovers 0, Chelsea 1.
In response, Roman Arkadievich Abramovich gives a polite laugh and a small bow. He makes a tiny gesture with his hands, opening them like upturned cups and spreading them apart: the semaphore of self-deprecation. “Yes,” he says, which is about as much English as he has allowed himself over the preceding five days in court.
One of the surprising things about Abramovich, a man of notoriously opaque facial expressions, is that he has such eloquent hands, which are in constant movement to add embellishment to the plainness of his verbal responses. While his left palm is held open and upturned, as if weighing the words he is about to utter in a tone of barely suppressed exasperation, the other hand will be clenched, only the index finger emerging to jab downwards in repeated emphasis. If you did not know that this was a man who made his money from oil and aluminium in the harshest imaginable business environment, you might imagine that they were the hands of an artist.
He turned up in good time for resumption of the case in which his erstwhile friend Boris Berezovsky is seeking compensation for shares in companies which Berezovsky claims they once owned together. Punctuality is the virtue of oligarchs, at least when someone is trying to take a few of their billions away.
Chelsea’s owner was occupying the witness box for the sixth day in a row, answering highly detailed questions about meetings and payments and favours given and received.
This is the longest close-up London has been given of the 45-year-old billionaire who bought Chelsea from Ken Bates in 2003, the first stage of an investment which must now be close to £1bn. That would represent around a tenth of his current fortune, of which Berezovsky is now claiming around half.
The minutiae of the case are mostly boring beyond belief but occasionally revelatory, as when he described the practice of krysha‚ the Russian word for “roof”, used to mean the sort of protection the well-connected Berezovsky provided his younger friend during the days when a small group of Russians were dividing the country’s wealth between them, or the concept of “transfer pricing”, which has nothing to do with Fernando Torres but is the arcane method of sale and repurchase of oil through which, at the expense of the Russian people, Abramovich amassed the fortune that kicked off the Premier League’s current financial arms race.
His friendship with President Putin is what appears to have saved him from the fate endured by Berezovsky, who is in exile in London, or Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was convicted of tax fraud and is currently banged up in Krasnokamensk, close to the Chinese border. Chelsea fans should pray that the relationship remains healthy.
During the breaks in the hearing Abramovich paces the floor outside the courtroom, grabbing a bar of chocolate or a bottle of water, smiling at associates and occasionally exchanging a word or at most two, observed by his trio of English bodyguards. When the day’s proceedings end they arrange themselves outside, scanning the street until he is picked up in a silver Mercedes people carrier, a modest vehicle, albeit armour-plated.
Yesterday’s proceedings were as dry as dust, except for when laughter greeted his remark that he never writes anything down because he usually can’t read his own handwriting, another example of his oft-proclaimed disdain for detail. But if there is any value for the disinterested observer in the proceedings in court 26, it is to demonstrate that the bland, slightly dopey image Abramovich projects from his upholstered seat in the West Stand at Stamford Bridge is very far from the actuality. As if we ever really thought any different.
At last Olympic organisers think inside the box
Thank goodness the London 2012 organisers are now trying to ensure that Box Hill, due to be climbed nine times by Mark Cavendish and his rivals during the Olympic men’s road race next summer, will be open to more than the few hundred spectators allowed on its slopes during the test event earlier this year. With a bit of thought, its ecological value can be safeguarded.
Meanwhile, cyclists experiencing withdrawal symptoms following the end of the road racing season are directed to Mountain High (Quercus, £20), a handsome volume by the photographer Pete Goding and the writer Daniel Friebe, who examine 50 great European climbs. Taking them in ascending order, they start with the malicious little Koppenberg, a feature of the Tour of Flanders, and end atop the 3,384m summit of the snow-capped Pico de Veleta, where the air is so thin that a rider’s oxygen intake is only 67% of that at sea level.
The Alpe d’Huez and the Stelvio are among the familiar names, but the authors also draw our attention to La Redoute, where Bernard Hinault permanently lost the feeling in two fingers in sub-zero conditions during the 1980 Liège-Bastogne-Liège classic, and the Croce d’Aune, the pass in the Dolomites where a mishap in 1927 inspired Tullio Campagnolo to invent the quick-release wheel, a boon to every subsequent rider. What they can’t solve is the riddle of why the Mont Ventoux should finish 3m higher when approached from the Malaucène side than it does from the more familiar Bédoin flank. But the great mountains like to guard their mysteries.
Florian Albert’s finest day
Florian Albert, the great Hungarian centre-forward, died last week, aged 70. For some of us the abiding memory of the 1966 World Cup will always come from Hungary’s 3-1 victory over Brazil at Goodison Park, and the move, started by a wonderfully perceptive pass from Albert, which climaxed with Janos Farkas volleying Ferenc Bene’s cross past a helpless Gilmar. A masterpiece of lethal fluency, invented by a blacksmith’s son.
Poppy row is a red herring
It is amusing, in a grim sort of way, that the campaign for England’s players to be allowed to override Fifa’s sensible ruling in order to wear the Remembrance Day poppy at Wembley on Saturday should be led by the newspaper that once proclaimed: “Hurrah for the Blackshirts!” Bogus patriotism does the dead no honour.
ChelseaRoman AbramovichRichard Williamsguardian.co.uk
