Page 46 of The Cellist

“A very wise woman once told me the same thing.”

“Really? Who?”

“Go on, Sergei.”

Once the original oligarchs had been put in their place, he said, the looting began—a wild orgy of self-dealing, kickback schemes, siphoning, embezzlement, protection rackets, tax fraud, and outright theft that enriched the men around the new president. They saw themselves as a new Russian nobility. They erected palaces, commissioned coats of arms, and traveled the country by a network of private roads. Most became billionaires many times over, but none was richer than Arkady Akimov. His oil trading firm, NevaNeft, was Russia’s largest. So was his commercial construction company, which was awarded endless government projects, always with bloated contracts.

“Such as?”

“The presidential palace on the Black Sea. It started out as a modest villa, about a thousand square meters. But by the time Volodya and Arkady were finished, the price tag was more than a billion dollars.”

That was pocket change, Morosov continued, when compared to the money Arkady earned from the Olympic Games in Sochi. The cost to the Russian taxpayer for the extravaganza on the shores of the Black Sea was more than $50 billion, nearlyfive times the original estimate. Arkady’s construction firm was awarded the largest slice of the pie, a forty-eight-kilometer highway and rail line running from the Olympic Park to the ski venues in the mountains. The contract was worth $9.4 billion.

“It was one of the greatest grifts in history. The Americans sent a probe to Mars for a fraction of that. Arkady could have paved the road in gold for less.”

“How much do you suppose Vladimir Vladimirovich let him keep for himself?”

“You know the old Russian proverb, Allon. What’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is mine.”

“Translation?”

“Volodya effectively controls the entire Russian economy. It’sallhis. He’s the one who chooses the winners and losers. And the winners remain winners only if he allows it.”

“He takes a cut of everything?”

Morosov nodded. “Everything.”

“Is he the richest man in the world?”

“Second, I’d say.”

“How much is there?”

“North of a hundred billion, but south of two.”

“How far south?”

“Not much.”

“Is any of it in his name?”

“He might have a billion or two stashed away in MosBank under his real name, but the rest of the money is held by trusted members of his inner circle like Arkady. He’s doing quite well for himself, is Arkady. NevaNeft is now the third-largest oil trading firm in the world. He owns a fleet of oil tankers, and he’s invested billions in pipelines, refineries, storage facilities,and terminals in Western Europe. About five years ago he moved his business to Geneva and established a Swiss-registered company called NevaNeft Trading SA. There’s also NevaNeft Holdings SA, which includes the rest of his empire.”

“Why Geneva?”

“It recently replaced London as the oil trading capital of the world. All the big Russian firms have offices there. It’s also located conveniently close to Zurich.”

“Home of the Russian Laundromat.”

Morosov nodded. “Arkady is a valued customer. RhineBank earns hundreds of millions of dollars a year in fees from laundering his money. As you might expect, they don’t ask many questions.”

“And if they did?”

“They would discover they are helping Arkady and his childhood friend from Baskov Lane achieve their most important goal.”

“What’s that?”

“Revenge.”