A former Fianna Fáil junior minister has spoken today of his working for a Russian oligarch with close ties to Vladimir Putin.
onor Lenihan, a former minister for human rights and a son of former foreign affairs minister Brian Lenihan, moved to Moscow in 2011 and worked for several years for Victor Vekselberg.
He is ranked the the fourth-wealthiest oligarch in Russia. Mr Lenihan was his international adviser. He told the Brendan O’Connor show today on RTE radio that Mr Vekselberg’s Skolkovo Foundation had partnerships with the West at the time of outreach by the Obama administration until 2016.
“Victor Vekselberg is one of the best-connected oligarchs in Moscow, worth around €14 billion,” Mr Lenihan said.
“I was on a business mandate, so I wasn’t involved in the politics, but I would say that if you’re very high profile in Moscow, and working there in a high profile capacity, not just as a foreigner, but even more importantly, as a Russian, you have to be very careful.”
Mr Lenihan described the murky world he experienced.
“A lot of the assassinations that you read about, and a lot of the firefights in the internal power feuds, are quite serious in Moscow, with serious consequences for all involved.”
He said very well known businessmen had been jailed, like Mr (Mikhail) Khorodkovsky and (Boris) Berezovsky, exiled from the country — he was in charge of the Security Council. The latter died in mysterious circumstances in the UK in 2013.
Mr Lenihan said: “There are very serious consequences for business people in Russia who become mixed up with the Kremlin and if you like, the power vortex in Russia. “
“I think that the important thing to remember about him, and of course, Putin himself, is that these are all children of what’s called politely in Russian circles, the Yeltsin family,” Mr Lenihan explained to listeners.
“The Yeltsin family, when (Boris) Yeltsin became ill and non-operative as leader, were kind of shielded and helped by a series of well-connected political people and wealthy billionaires of one kind or another.
“The final years of Yeltsin were a kind of a hollowed-out experience where he wasn’t well himself, and he wasn’t with it to a certain extent.
“These are the people that are still running Russia. They are politely called the Yeltsin family. Members of the Yeltsin family are still involved.
“And then there’s a kind of a mosaic of oligarchs, wealthy people and then securocrats who worked with Mr Putin in his period and the KGB.
“So this connection of kind of… we could call them securocrats, bureaucrats and very wealthy people.”
His boss had “absolutely” been at that level, he agreed with Mr O’Connor. “It’s a tricky position. It’s a tricky line to be able to have to walk, to mind your money and as well, mind your, your Ps and Qs and political terms.
“People would like to be a billionaire oligarch, but it’s a tricky job in Russia.”
Asked if he was “happy enough being an enabler or facilitator for Vekselberg or whether he had a sour taste in your mouth about it at stage, Mr Lenihan said: “I didn’t in particular, no.
“I worked with for this thing called Skolkovo, a project actually designed to wean Russia off its dependence on oil and gas. It was an innovation hub on the edge of Moscow.
“We had M.I.T. (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), who were our partner from America, and the US State Department were helping our project, so it was a much different time.”
Mr Lenihan added: “If you cast your mind back to the period I was there, we were still in the period described pretty overtly as Obama’s reset.
“So the Americans were very much engaging with Russia. In fact, (Dmitri) Medvedev was President and Putin was prime minister. We know that reversed around and changed rather swiftly, but the net point was there was a lot of optimism that Russia wanted to progress and become more Western — more in a sense like us.”
He added: “The project I was working on was just about that. And we had former university professors from Ireland working there as well.”
Asked if the oligarchs could now move against Putin, Mr Lenihan said: “There are two schools of opinion on that. I suspect there will be a move of some kind, but it may not be as visible and obvious to people outside Russia.
“But there are serious power brokers within Putin’s own system, who will not be happy or comfortable what’s happening, and may decide to choose this as an opportunity to move him on.”
This could happen with “a two year view,” he said, but Mr Putin was likely to still be in power in six months’ time.
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