The Times followed up its initial article about Boris Berezovsky, “the exiled Russian oligarch who was found dead on Saturday, outside London,” as Sarah Lyall wrote, in “For Homesick Russian Tycoon, Instant of Ruin Came in Court.”
I was blown away by a few initial paragraphs in which the judge who found against him described Berezovsky:
It came instead in an unremarkable courtroom in London last August, when a judge told him exactly why his $5.1 billion lawsuit against Roman A. Abramovich, a former business associate, had failed so badly.
As Mr. Berezovsky—a man once so powerful he brokered national elections and treated multi-billion-dollar companies as personal cash machines—looked on, stunned, the judge called him “dishonest,” “unimpressive” and “inherently unreliable.”
She said he had invented evidence, contradicted himself and made up his story as he went along. And, perhaps most devastating to a man whose inflated self-belief was nearly all he had left, she said he had “deluded himself into believing his own version of events.”
Does this sound like someone you know? Does it? Tell me about it.