A ‘bum’ deal
It’s modern Russia, rich in oil and gas and much else besides. A reconstructed Russia, where deals are made about everything that used to be thought of as belonging to the State. Now it is individuals who get wealthy, ruthlessly, cunningly but never carelessly. And one man sits at the middle of all this, Richard Lock. Immensely wealthy, well he is on paper. A lawyer by training, he is the spider in the middle of the web – more that eighty companies and their assets are at his command. Farringdon Holdings controls assets through more than forty different companies, whose shareholders are themselves companies registered in those parts of the world where disclosure of information is stubbornly resisted. And wrapping it up is Longway, an unbreakable trust. The one name missing from all this is Konstantin Malin, the Russian whose bidding Lock did, and who had gone to extreme lengths to make sure he could never be connected to the millions involved.
The sweetest game Malin played was with assets that had no cost and an entirely speculative value – licences to explore, extract, sell natural resources. The promise of money for nothing was always a strong pull – even sweeter when the licences were held by companies that had actually assigned them on to others in the network. When the purchaser got what they had paid for, they could find that 'the cupboard was bare'.
Aristotle Tourna got stung to the tune of fifty million dollars. He was a decidedly unhappy man.