More like this
Boris Berezovsky divorce could cost record £100m
Galina sought divorce ‘after seeing his girlfriend described as his wife’
The cost of divorce for London's rich and powerful just hit the roof. Boris Berezovsky, the Russian oligarch who lives in exile in Britain, is expected by legal experts to have to pay his wife Galina as much as £100m after she won a divorce from the billionaire in the High Court yesterday.
The settlement would be the biggest in British legal history - almost ten times the amount awarded to Terence Conran's third wife Caroline Conran, whose £10.5m award in 1997 set the benchmark for the new era of divorce settlements, with wives receiving massive awards even if they played little or no direct part in raising their husband's wealth.
The current British record is the £48m awarded by the High Court to Beverley Charman in 2006 on her divorce from the insurance magnate John Charman. He called the settlement "grotesque", claiming he had been penalised for 15 unhappy years he had spent with her for the sake of their children.
Berezovsky, by contrast, is not expected to complain, even though he built up most of his wealth - once estimated at $1bn, but now thought to be considerably less - after he and Galina separated in the mid-1990s. He wants to move ahead and marry his girlfriend of the past 15 years, Yelena Gorbunova.
Like the other new Russian oligarchs, Berezovsky's wealth derives from Boris Yeltsin's decision to sell off state assets to favoured friends and supporters in the 1990s. A Moscow professor of mathematics earning £60 a month when he and Galina first met in 1981, Berezovsky picked up the oil firm Sibneft and the majority stake in the TV channel ORT.
He and Galina married in 1991, the year Yeltsin - whom he described as his "mentor" - came to power. But they stayed together only two years or so before separating.
She lives with the couple's teenage children in a London penthouse overlooking Hyde Park, while he shares his 172-acre Wentworth Park estate in Surrey with Yelena.
There are reports that Galina, 51, decided to file for divorce because she was annoyed at reading reports that continually described Yelena as the oligarch's "wife". ·
