| Daily Mail Article - Headline: Meet Dave's other chums who made billions under Putin and are bankrolling the Tories
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Andrey Borodin
* company registered to Borodin’s address paid £40,000 for a portrait of Margaret Thatcher
... paying £140 million for Park Place in Henley-on-Thames when he arrived in Britain three years ago
... fortune estimated at £1 billion
... former banker under Putin’s rule (Bank of Moscow)
... named Russia’s banker of the year in 2001
... fell out with [Putin] for reasons that remain unclear
... accused (by Kremlin) of being head of organised crime group that swindled £850 million in an elaborate foreign
currency scam.
... denies all wrong-doing, saying any criminality was carried out by his underlings
... granted asylum to live in the UK by David Cameron after an alleged plot to assassinate him was uncovered in
2011
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Alexander Temerko
* donating £474,555 to the Tories
* Conservative Leaders’ Group, where members pay £50,000 a year for access to prominent frontbenchers
* famously paid £90,000 for a bust of Mr Cameron at a Tory fundraising event
* his energy company has been paid at least £4.5 million of taxpayers’ cash through the Department for Business’s Regional Growth Fund
An oligarch with ambitions to become a British MP, Alexander Temerko
... hails from Ukraine
... made his fortune as a senior oil executive with Yukos, Russia’s massive former state oil company
... the centre of allegations of widespread corruption ( subsequently dissolved)
He, too, has been accused by his former friends in the Kremlin of being leader of a criminal gang involved in fraud against former Soviet state-owned companies — charges a UK court found were politically motivated.
A spokesman for the oligarch last night told us that he ‘does not expect anything back’ from the Tories in return for his donation, and pointed to the fact that he was fighting extradition by the Russian authorities as evidence of his distance from Putin.
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Alexander Knaste
* British citizenship in 2011
* donating more than £400,000 to the Tory Party
Billionaire.
Born in Moscow, Alexander Knaster is a familiar face on London’s political fund-raising circuit after taking British citizenship in 2011 and donating more than £400,000 to the Tory Party.
He grew up in the U.S., after his family emigrated during the Leonid Brezhnev era, but returned to Russia to work for Credit-Suisse bank in 1995 as capitalism took off.
Knaster, 55, who lives in Kensington, has since added to his fortune by helping other rich Putin cronies, both former and current, to move their cash out of Russia and invest it in the West, in both British companies and property.
He is now running Pamplona Capital Management in London, and is reputed to be worth £1.5 billion. His business in particular would be hard hit by sanctions, with David Cameron promising to publish the names of those likely to be affected this weekend.
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George Piskov
* attending Tory Party fundraisers
* made a £10,000 donation direct to party headquarters in 2012
Yet another wealthy Russian banker who made a fortune during the so-called ‘wild west years’ following the collapse of communism, Piskov made billions from launching a money transfer service across his vast homeland.
He formed a bank called Uniastrum, which became one of the fastest-growing businesses in Russia during these boom years, but ran into trouble during the global financial crash of 2007/08.
As well as a string of directorships in Russia, which he visits regularly on business, he is also the official representative of all Russian banks in London, making him one of the most powerful financial figures here.
More recently, the Cyprus government has been probing the circumstances surrounding the Bank of Cyprus’s purchase of Uniastrum Bank.
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Lev Mikheev
* donated almost £100,000 to the Tories since moving to the UK
Russian-born investment banker (part of his childhood in the U.S.) - aged 51
... well placed to tap into the new emerging markets oligarchs were keen to invest in.
... billionaire financier with offices in London and next door to the Kremlin in the Russian capital. He has homes in London, Moscow and the U.S.
... Much of his fortune came through a hedge fund called Salute Capital Management, named after the former Soviet Union’s space exploration programme Salyut, and he is reputed to have invested £1 billion a year on behalf of the new wave of wealthy clients to emerge under Putin’s rule.
SOURCE - Daily Mail - 25 July 2014 - here.
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Not sure what the big deal is. The donations don't seem that huge.
Putin was mentioned heaps in the article, I'm guessing implying that Putin somehow enriched these guys (or, that's what I got out of it). Correct me if I'm wrong.
How much influence would these people have in UK?
Probably as much influence as anybody with cash and connections has in the UK.
So what's the issue?
