Bokelskere.no

There was the forty-one-year-old Suleiman Kerimov, a quicksilver native of Dagestan, the volatile region neighbouring Chechnya. He’d first hit the headlines in 2006, when he’d wrapped his Ferrari around a tree on Nice’s Promenade des Anglais and nearly died from the burns, after which he retreated to the lowlit air-conditioned cool of his office on the top floor of a heavily guarded Moscow townhouse, his burned hands protected by thin fingerless gloves. Once he recovered he became notorious again for his lavish parties, where the likes of Beyoncé crooned to senior bankers from Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs at his villa in Cap d’Antibes. By early 2007 Forbes was estimating his fortune at $14.4 billion, making him Russia’s second-richest man after Abramovich.

'Of all the places in the world where God in His infinite wisdom decided to put oil, Russia seemed one of the more civilised regions compared to the rogues' gallery they were dealing with in Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein,' said the Western intermediary. 'Up against that crew, Alexei Miller looked like a schoolboy.'