By Yossi Melman
It's hard to believe that this smiling man with the somewhat youthful appearance, dressed casually in jeans, is suspected of involvement in several murders. Of course, looks can be misleading. Yet doubt does arise when it comes to the Russian legal system, which is pursuing the proceedings against him. In the West, Israel included, Russian justice long ago lost its credibility, certainly insofar as the rise and fall of the Yukos energy corporation goes. Up until three years ago, Leonid Nevzlin was the number 2 man in the company and one of the most influential oligarchs in Russia and its Jewish community. His fortune in stocks and holdings at Yukos was estimated then at $2 billion. Had Yukos continued to exist and to benefit from the rise in oil prices, his assets could have easily doubled to $4 billion.
But three years ago, the Kremlin, under orders from Vladimir Putin, took over Yukos. The company, which at its peak was worth $40 billion, went bankrupt, and its assets were sold off to Putin associates. Two of the major stockholders, Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev, are rotting in jail. Three others, including Nevzlin, fled to Israel, where they found refuge and became Israeli citizens less than three years ago.
But one needn't feel too sorry for Nevzlin. Even though he lost all his assets in Russia, by his own estimate, he is still worth about $1 billion. Within the relatively short time that he has been living here, he has become one of the biggest philanthropists in Israel. Together with two partners, Vladimir Dubov and Mikhail Brudno, he established the Nadav Foundation (the name is composed of the Hebrew initials of the men's surnames). He was also appointed chairman of Beth Hatefutsoth - the Nahum Goldmann Museum of the Jewish Diaspora. His contributions to aliyah projects and educational institutions in Israel total some $15 million. Only Bank Hapoalim has given more during the same period, but not much more.
At first, the Russian state prosecution accused him of tax evasion and other fraud-related offenses. Then it "upgraded" the charge to include ordering murders. The Russian government accuses Nevzlin of organizing a double contract killing and instructing Alexei Pichugin, a Yukos security officer, to murder businessman Sergei Gorin and his wife, Olga, who supposedly knew some of Yukos' dark secrets. The legal problem is that the bodies of the murder victims were never found, and in fact there is no hard evidence that they died.
Pichugin's trial has been going on behind closed doors, a rare arrangement for a criminal trial. Investigators from the Russian federal security service (the FSB) put extremely heavy pressure on Pichugin to incriminate Nevzlin. But Pichugin refused to comply and denied all involvement by either himself or Nevzlin in the murders. Despite this, the court convicted Pichugin on the basis of dubious evidence, including the hearsay of a convicted criminal. The criminal said that Gurin told him he had been involved in organizing assaults against Yukos' rivals - at Pichugin's instruction. According to the criminal's testimony, Gurin also said that if something ever happened to him, then Pichugin and the Yukos corporation would be the ones behind it.
The state prosecutor also accuses Nevzlin of having ordered the assassinations of two other people (the orders were not carried out). Because of these charges, the Russian government is asking Israel (and the United States, where Nevzlin recently visited) to extradite him. The Justice Ministry in Jerusalem, which has received two such requests, has no intention of complying - certainly not on the basis of the evidence supplied by the Russian state prosecutor. A source in the Justice Ministry said that "The Russians have not provided the least evidence to justify the opening of an investigation, let alone the extradition of an Israeli citizen to a country whose justice system is problematic, to put it mildly." Before long, an official message along these lines will probably be transmitted to Moscow.
Another murder mysteryBut the Putin government isn't ready to leave Nevzlin alone. It views him as one of its biggest enemies, for one thing because Nevzlin is involved in organizing public campaigns in the West against the government in Russia, and in denouncing the government in Russia, which he compares to that of Stalin. Last week, another murder trial began in Moscow, in which Alexei Pichugin is the defendant, though it's clear that Nevzlin is the real target this time, too.
In this case, Pichugin is accused of having murdered Vladimir Petukhov, the mayor of Nefteyugansk, a city of 100,000 in Western Siberia, in 1998. Most of the city's inhabitants were employed by the Yukos production department. Petukhov, a petroleum engineer and a throwback to the Soviet era, was considered an honest and fair sort. He demanded that Yukos pay its past debts to the city. His obstinacy on this point brought him into confrontation with Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who refused to recognize the debt that had originated during the era of the Soviet Union, before he purchased the company.
At the time, Khodorkovsky was still in the first stage of his development as an oligarch. He was a hungry young man, without inhibitions, and in his race to the top he surrounded himself with a large network of bodyguards and security personnel, all alumni of the KGB and the FSB. The network was established to protect the company facilities from property theft and sabotage, but the security people behaved condescendingly toward the locals, as if they were above the law, or as if they embodied the law. The possibility that the mayor was murdered by local criminals, as his widow told the Moscow Times last week, is not deterring the state prosecutor from its attempt to show that the motive for the murder lies in the confrontation between the mayor and Yukos, Khodorkovsky and Nevzlin.
Are you a murderer? Before Nevzlin answers the question, he offers a long explanation. He says that he recently read the writings of Ze'ev Jabotinsky and his disciple, Menachem Begin. He was especially intrigued by the chapter on the period of Begin's detention in harsh conditions in Soviet Gulag prison camps. He also read about the meeting Begin had with an interrogator from the NKVD, Stalin's secret police. Begin was accused of anti-Soviet activity and of involvement in acts of murder.
"The accusations and the meeting in the camp strengthened Begin's resolve. From there he began the intellectual and practical journey that led him to Palestine."
Are you comparing yourself to Begin? "Of course not. But I also met with an interrogator, and this encounter changed my life for the better, and indirectly for the better of Israel, too."
And what about the murder charges? "I'm prepared to give an accounting to any legal system, apart from the Russian one. I haven't done anything in my life to be ashamed of. I certainly didn't kill anyone or give orders to have anyone killed. It's all lies. In July 2003 I was summoned for questioning to give testimony regarding the claims that were made at the time against Yukos, claims having to do with taxes and monetary matters. The person who questioned me was an investigator from the general prosecution. But he was really acting on instructions and according to the plan of the FSB, the secret police who are continuing the work of the NKVD and the KGB.
"It wasn't a real interrogation, but more like a conversation and preliminary inquiry. I asked him: Maybe they - the FSB - are mistaken? Maybe they're making things up about me and lying? His answer was: They are never wrong and they never lie. It was the typical answer of a Marxist-Leninist. Absolute faith in their truth, which is usually an absolute lie, of course. The investigation and court system works like this: First they decide that you're guilty and then they select the agents whose job it is to supply the supposedly incriminating information."
Do you know the security officer who was convicted of murder - murder committed at your behest, according to the prosecution - and recently sentenced to decades in prison? "I don't know him personally. He was one of the security officers who worked at Yukos. I met him once or twice. Always in social circumstances, when there was a party for company employees. There were 120,000 people working at Yukos. I knew the names and faces of about a thousand of them. Actually, I stopped working at Yukos in 1998. I continued to be a stockholder, but I devoted most of my time to public activity. I was a senator (in the Upper House of the Russian parliament), I was active in Jewish organizations and I nurtured the university that I founded. Therefore I was far removed from Yukos employees and had no reason or time to meet with low or mid-level company employees, such as a security officer."
Nevzlin vividly recalls the interrogation. For him, it was a watershed. It took place on July 4, 2003 - the U.S. Independence Day. Yukos' main shareholder, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the person most closely identified with the corporation, was also summoned for questioning then. They were interrogated at the same time, separately, in nearby rooms. At that point, the investigators did not make any mention of the murder charge. All that he and Khodorkovsky were asked to do, says Nevzlin, was to give testimony and respond to claims that financial irregularities had been discovered in the company, and to a suspicion of tax evasion. "The investigation then, like now, was ridiculous. It was 100 percent provocation. Afterward, I wasn't summoned for any more questioning."
Not long after the interrogation, Nevzlin came to Israel. He wishes to emphasize that he did not flee to Israel because of the investigation. But, naturally, it did play an important part in his decision. "I'd thought about making aliyah before that, when I was active in Jewish organizations. I felt solidarity with Israel and I considered myself a Zionist. Then I thought I'd be able to divide my time between Israel and Russia."
About two weeks after he was called in for questioning, Nevzlin began a three-month vacation that he planned to devote to the writing of his doctoral thesis. At the time, he was the rector of the Russian State University for the Humanities, of which he is quite proud. This was the first private university ever established in Russia, and it was made possible in large part by Nevzlin's sizeable financial contribution. His aim was to model it after a Western academic institution. Since he was the only university rector in Russia without a doctorate, he decided to take the time to write a dissertation.
The topic he chose was the influence of 18th-century and early 19th-century German philosophers, such as Hegel, on philosophical thought in Russia. At first he worked on the dissertation while vacationing in Cyprus. Then he moved on to Israel, where he rented an apartment in Jaffa. Surrounded by a computer, books, articles and beautiful women, he was really enjoying life. But the horizon was beginning to darken.
The arrestAt first, neither Nevzlin nor Khodorkovzky sensed any danger. They were rich and famous and influential both inside and outside Russia. Khodorkovsky was considered the wealthiest man in Russia. They were young, full of ambition, and had taken advantage of the age of corruption and privatization under president Boris Yeltsin to acquire extensive property that was sold for next to nothing. And they weren't the only ones. There was also Roman Abramovich, Vladimir Gusinsky, Boris Berezovsky, Mikhail Friedman, Vyacheslav Kantor, Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov and his wife, and dozens more clever entrepreneurs, many of them of Jewish background.
And thus the oligarch class grew - people who had nothing and within a few years became multimillionaires. In dollars, not rubles. Not content to just enjoy their riches, they also wanted to wield some influence in Russian and international politics. To appoint governors, senators, members of the Duma and government officials. Khodorkovsky was the driving force, and Nevzlin was his right-hand man. In 1994, when Nevzlin was 35, they bought the Rusprom Group and the Menatep Bank, and through them took control of Yukos. They became the major shareholders of the largest corporation in Russia, which was also one of the world's largest oil and gas companies.
They conducted negotiations for a potential merger with Sibneft, the oil company owned by oligarch Roman Abramovich. The American oil companies were eager to do business with them and several also held contacts regarding a potential merger. After the tough administrative practices of the early years, the Yukos owners tried to introduce a different management culture into their company, one that was less Russian and oligarchic, and to adopt Western models: proper management, relative transparency, the uprooting of corruption and bribery.
The government of Vladimir Putin might possibly have been able to live with all the business "whims" of the young, ambitious pair and their friends. After all, until quite recently, Putin was not opposed to the principles of capitalist economics, and had no objection to Russia being home to wealthy moguls and successful companies - just as long as they toed the line, were obedient, and most important, were devoid of any political ambitions. But the Yukos owners had objectives that crossed the lines demarcated by Putin and his people.
Perhaps Khodorkovsky and Nevzlin were too arrogant to notice the boundaries that had been set. Or perhaps they really didn't see them, or saw them but thought that if they crossed them, nothing bad would happen to them. After all, they were used to coming and going in the corridors of power in Washington and Western European capitals. And who would have thought that Putin would display such determination and tenacity in going after his target, to the point of carrying out what could be called a targeted economic assassination: The eradication of the company and the unrelenting persecution of its owners.
What apparently did them in, the straw that broke the camel's back, was their political and financial support for the liberal and centrist parties. Khodorkovsky, Nevzlin and the other top people at Yukos were patrons of the Union of Rightist Forces headed by Boris Nemtsov. These parties sought to seriously challenge Putin's presidency. There was also talk about Khodorkovsky submitting his candidacy for the 2004 presidential elections.
In late September 2003, while still waiting to be granted Israeli citizenship (which required him to spend three consecutive months in Israel), Nevzlin saw his partner for the last time. Khodorkovsky, who is not Jewish according to Jewish law (only his father is Jewish) and whose connection with Israel was exceedingly flimsy, came here for a brief visit on his way back to Russia from another business trip to the U.S. The meeting took place in a hotel by the Tel Aviv beach.
"Before that, I'd told him a number of times to leave Russia," says Nevzlin. "I realized already that Putin had us in his sights. All his friends told him to leave, at least for a while. But he was a man of principle. He decided to stay and fight to the end. At that last meeting of ours, I again told him that he ought to leave Russia. He asked me when I was returning to Russia. He said that he felt my absence and needed me by his side. I told him that I'd return after I finished writing my dissertation and after I received my Israeli citizenship. I was supposed to be back by November to defend my thesis at the Philosophy Institute in order to receive the degree, but deep down I knew that I wouldn't be going back to Russia."
Did you kiss at the end of the meeting? "No, because that's not the Russian tradition. I prefer to kiss women and not men. Neither of us thought that it would be our last meeting."
And then, about a month after the meeting, came the well-publicized FSB raid and the arrest of Khodorkovsky. Were you surprised? "No, I wasn't surprised by the arrest per se. But I was definitely surprised by the way in which they did it. They could have asked him to come in for questioning at the police station. But for the sake of dramatic effect, they preferred to make a nighttime raid with a special FSB force on his plane at a small airport outside Moscow, when he was on a lecture tour. It was all for show."
Are you angry at him for not listening to your advice and to the advice of your friends and not having escaped in time? "I'm not angry at him. I just find it hard to understand. He had a great ability to see what was coming. He provided strategic forecasts. He had an analytic and scientific mind and always looked several steps ahead. But sometimes he didn't see what was happening right under his nose. It happens sometimes, even to geniuses. More than once I told him: How can you work with and put your trust in the corrupt scoundrels from the Kremlin? Had he heeded my advice and the recommendations of friends and left Russia, he wouldn't have been arrested and I have no doubt that then it would have been possible to reach a compromise with the authorities and to save the company, which would have continued to exist."
In the past couple of years, you and your two partners in Israel have spent a fortune on media and public relations campaigns for the sake of Khodorkovsky and against Putin. Does this stem from guilt feelings over the fact that you're here, living a free life, while he is languishing in prison? Just recently, there was a report that another prisoner attacked and wounded him. "I don't feel guilt, because he was number 1 in the company and I was number 2. He made the decisions. I'll give you an example. I really wish that all human beings could be healthy and wealthy and I try to help those who don't have enough, but it's not because of me that they're in whatever condition they're in. I'm not responsible for wrecking their lives."
You've made some very blunt statements against Putin's government. You said that he is surrounded by anti-Semites and is leading Russia into a neo-Stalinist age. "That's right. I still think so. The people sitting in the Kremlin are bandits and it's all corrupt. But enough about Russia. I want to talk about the present and the future and not about the past. About Israel and not about Russia."
Do you feel Israeli? "Now, yes, but it took me some time to get used to being Israeli. Now I feel like an Israeli."
In what sense? "I feel like a citizen of the state, that my home is here. My two daughters recently came to live in Israel and my ex-wife and her husband also made aliyah."
He may feel Israeli, but the interview was conducted in English. Nevzlin is still struggling with Hebrew.
The professionalLeonid Nevzlin was born in Moscow in 1959. He studied computers at the Institute of Oil and Gas Chemistry in Moscow and earned a degree as a software engineer. In the early 1980s, he worked at the Soviet Institute of Geology. In 1989, at the height of the perestroika and glasnost introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev, he joined forces with Mikhail Khodorkovsky and became a business entrepreneur. The rest is history.
Within five years, the two were owners of a bank, a holding company and - the jewel in the crown of their business empire - Yukos. Toward the end of the 1990s, Nevzlin cut down on his involvement in Yukos and, together with Khodorkovsky, devoted more time to political and public activity, with an emphasis on strengthening democracy and preserving human rights in Russia. At the end of 2001, he was elected as a senator and served as chairman of the Upper House's Foreign Affairs Committee.
In order to advance their goals, the two founded Open Russia, a nonprofit organization that offered funding to civil projects. Among other things, they established a school of public administration and an association for Internet learning. Above all, Nevzlin worked on his "baby": the liberal arts university. Unlike Khodorkovsky, Nevzlin was also involved in the Jewish community and donated generously to its organizations, like the ORT network. In 2001, he was elected president of the Jewish Congress in Russia (REK), succeeding Vladimir Gusinsky in the post.
He has been married twice (he is currently in the process of divorcing his second wife) and is considered a sought-after bachelor, but Nevzlin gently rebuffs all attempts to learn about his private life. He will only say that he has had an Israeli girlfriend for about a year now. As in Russia, in Israel, too, he is chiefly involved in education. He left the management of the business side of the company in which he is a partner, the Menatep Group, in the hands of Mikhail Brudno. Nevzlin estimates the company's worth at about $1.5 billion. He holds a 67 percent share (this includes Khodorkovsky's share, which Khodorkovsky transferred to Nevzlin). In the past two years, the company has invested several hundred million dollars in media businesses in Eastern and Central Europe, including in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland.
Members of Menatep's international advisory board include Stuart Eisenstadt, a former U.S. deputy treasury secretary, and Dr. Otto Graf Lambsdorff, a former economics minister of Germany. Its activity in Israel is limited. About a year ago it purchased 26 percent in Petrochemical Enterprises (IPE), in partnership with David Federman. Nevzlin says that he doesn't know exactly how big the company's financial investments are and that it doesn't interest him that much.
"I prefer to be a professional on liberal arts issues and to leave the running of the business to him [Brudno]," he says. We decided how much money to invest, together we determined the parameters, and from that moment on, Brudno is the one responsible for management and for making profits and that's it."
Money doesn't interest you? "I don't read balance sheets. Money for me is just an instrumental thing and doesn't necessarily make people happy. It's just money."
The partnership with Federman, an owner of the Maccabi Tel Aviv Basketball Group, spawned rumors that Nevzlin had been offered the chance to buy the club's basketball team. Nevzlin adamantly denies this. Investments in sport don't interest him, even though up to age 40 he was an active athlete and practiced karate and ancient Chinese martial arts. In Israel, he walks on the Herzliya beach, near his home, and will soon obtain a license to fly ultra-light aircraft.
"I'm not interested in sports because I don't understand how it works - if it's a business or a charity," he says. And besides, he has no desire to imitate Arkady Gaydamak. "I met him a few times in Russia, but I have no business ties with him."
What do you think of how he conducts himself? "He has his style and his ideas and I hope he doesn't need advice from me. But I've noticed that his attitude toward charity is like it's big business. But he's not to blame. He's a businessman. I hope he won't find that it's a mistake to judge contributions to the community only on the basis of the results of the bottom line on the balance sheet."
And do you know Lev Leviev? "No. I don't know him personally."
Does the term "oligarch" offend you? "It's a negative term. In countries with a centralized economy, like Russia, it is used to designate people who have a lot of money and influence on the government decisions."
Like you? "We weren't oligarchs, because we weren't part of the government. In Russia there were oligarchs, like Abramovich, Friedman and others, who did influence the government. Not us. The government fought us."
