Roman Abramovich arrives in a silver Mercedes with blacked-out windows. He steps out of the car and is immediately flanked by massive men who make sure nobody gets in his way. But when the oligarch walks through the revolving doors of the Commercial Court in the City of London, even he has to play by somebody else’s rules.
“Court will rise,” says the clerk, and one of the world’s richest men stands, with his bodyguards, lawyers, translators, advisers and hangers-on, in deference to Dame Elizabeth Gloster, the 62-year-old judge who is the law in this room.
She will be in charge for the next three months, or as long as it takes to settle a dispute worth £3.5 billion. Abramovich, owner of Chelsea Football Club, is being sued for breach of trust and breach of contract by his former friend Boris Berezovsky, after allegedly breaking an agreement they made in the 1990s. “I trusted him. I believed he was like my son,” says the small but pugnacious claimant. “He betrayed me.”
Dressed in a dark blue suit and open-necked white shirt, the 63-year-old Berezovsky looks like a well-groomed Danny DeVito. Just before the session opens, he reaches up to put an arm around the neck of his much taller and younger girlfriend, Yelena Gorbunova, and plants a kiss somewhere below her ear.
Earlier this year, Berezovsky, who has been with Ms Gorbunova for 15 years, agreed to the most expensive divorce settlement in British history, paying at least £100 million to his second wife. Ms Gorbunova resembles the first lady of France, Carla Bruni, as she sits in a black suit among the lawyers. Read more
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