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My story in the @FTMag today - The Fugitive Prince: how a man with a claim to a royal title and a vast fortune made a deal with a notorious businessman that cost him more than he could have imagined.
Miles Johnson
1,531 posts
Miles Johnson
@MilesMJohnson
Investigative reporter at @FinancialTimes. Author of CHASING SHADOWS. Podcast: HOT MONEY: THE NEW NARCOS.
- Old enough to remember that just *last year* some of London’s finest legal minds were being paid vast sums by Prigozhin to claim in England's High Court that he had *nothing* to do with Wagner.
- Just a reminder that *less than a year ago* UK lawyers working for the guy now toddling around Bakhmut with a machine gun dressed in military fatigues were claiming he had suffered “great distress” from allegations he had *anything* to do with mercenary activity.
00:00 - Today Boris Johnson said oligarchs in the UK will “have nowhere to hide”. On the same day Andrey Guryev, owner of Witanhurst (the largest mansion in London after Buckingham Palace), attended a solidarity meeting of oligarchs with Putin in the Kremlin. Pretty brazen.Replying to @maxseddonBehold Russia's business elite, in the Kremlin's Hall of the Order of St Catherine, where the astonishing security council session with Putin was on Monday. Alexander Shokhin, who heads the oligarch lobby group, is talking about cryptocurrency regulation as Ukraine burns.
- Italy’s policy of vaccinating younger priority workers over the elderly has likely cost thousands of lives, and has made it an outlier among large European countries. Contrary to the prevailing narrative this is not simply a result of a lack of vaccine supply.
- “WAGNER INC”: Yevgeny Prigozhin is not only a mercenary boss but an international criminal entrepreneur who has built up what is, in effect, a mining and natural resources multinational powered by war crimes and human rights abuses
- Russia confirms Putin will not physically be in Rome for the G20 at the end of the month. So no Xi, no Putin, no Kishida, an outgoing Merkel, and Macron in campaign mode. Possibly not the best setup for getting much done...
- 1/ This is a story about modern finance. It begins in a hospital infiltrated by organised criminals in southern Italy and ends in the investment portfolios of clients of a private bank in Luxembourg.
- More fascinating details on what apparently counts as “thorough due diligence” at Credit Suisse after some Bulgarian clients who had deposited suitcases of cash driven in from the Balkans started getting assassinated.
- Still lost in the EU vaccine supplies/exports drama is the fact that Italy has decided to give away a massive amount of its available shots to the least vulnerable parts of its population.
- Replying to @MilesMJohnsonHere is the section of Prigozhin’s English high court claim where his lawyers outlined the apparently unbelievable and outrageous allegations made against their client in his libel case against @EliotHiggins:
- London new build flats overlooking MI6 HQ, owned by anonymous offshore companies linked to Russia, have become a security threat. Cracking story by @Richard_AHolmes
- Replying to @MilesMJohnsonAnd here is the part where the lawyers told the court about the "damage and distress" these allegations had caused Prigozhin, and the “grave damage” it had inflicted on his reputation:
- It feels like the UK is mentally 2 weeks behind Italy, not just in terms of its number of cases. I find it surreal people are shocked a lockdown is expected to be imposed on London. I guess even if you are watching the news it doesn’t even seem possible until it happens to you.
