Boris Berezovsky's name in Russia is irrevocably linked to the "wild capitalism" of the 1990s, when vast fortunes were made out of privatising state assets and Kremlin connections which ensured the lowest of knock down prices.
Russian prosecutors have tried and failed to extradite the billionaire oligarch from London on charges connected to that era. He and an associate were accused of defrauding the Samara region of 60bn roubles (£8m), in used Ladas.
Mr Berezovsky claimed the charges were politically motivated and they were later dropped in Russia.
Mr Berezovsky pursued a libel case in Britain against Forbes magazine after its reporter Paul Klebnikov, an American journalist from a Russian emigre family, tried to link the oligarch to the assassination of a prominent television journalist Vladislav Listyev. The case was settled when Forbes accepted the allegations were false.
Much of the stigma from which Mr Berezovsky suffers in Russia dates from his connections with The Family, the clique of advisers around former president Boris Yeltsin, who made personal fortunes from a period where no rules seemed to have applied.
Mr Berezovsky claimed in a previous interview with The Guardian that he got " not one penny" from his connections with Mr Yeltsin and his daughter Tatiana Dyachenko.
But what is left of Russia's democratic opposition well remembers the political service that Mr Berezovsky delivered in taking over 36% of the main television channel's voting stock in 1995. The channel, ORT became the chief engine of Mr Yeltsin's re-election campaign in 1996, in which the choice to the electorate was presented as one between the Reds and the Whites, a reference to Russia's bloody civil war which polarised the race and squeezed out democratic alternatives to Mr Yeltsin.
Russian analysts say the seeds of Kremlin's control of the media, were laid then. This is one of pillars of the autocracy of Vladimir Putin, a man that Mr Berezovsky initially backed but subsequently broke with when he moved to rein in the oligarchs who had profited so under the old regime.
