“Julia Timoshenko kept a total of twenty-two bodyguards on her payroll, all former Spetznaz commandos, graduates of the Red Army’s most elite killing academy.”
“The file on her was maddeningly thin, consisting of a few rumpled Ukrainian press clippings of dubious veracity and a number, underlined twice and adorned with large question marks. The number was $11,000,000,000, the gross revenue of Timoshenko’s virtually unknown Ukrainian company. … Not even Coca-Cola earned that much from its combined international sales.”
“… Could we have lunch later in the week? I quickly agreed.”
“Good,” she smiled. “It’s all set then. I’ll send the plane to you.”
Plane?
“You can fly down to Dnepropetrovsk in the morning, and the jet will bring you back to Moscow by six.”
I tried not to sound over-eager. “I can catch a commercial flight. I don’t want to tie up your company plane.”
“Don’t worry,” laughed Timoshenko. “I have four of them.”
As we drove along the tarmac, passing a gigantic Antonov cargo plane whose hold gaped open like the mouth of a feeding whale, a sparkling apparition came into view. It was Timoshenko’s jet. Its underbelly was painted gold, as was the lettering on the sleek dark-blue fuselage. The letters formed the words Unified Energy Systems of Ukraine, in English on side and in Ukrainian on the other. On the tailfin, rays of a painted sun formed a golden halo around the fiery UESU logo. “Have a nice flight.”
“Along the way, she struck up an alliance with Dnepropetrovsk’s regional governor, a wily former collective-farm boss by the name of Pavlo Lazarenko. (This was the very same Lazarenko who would end up in a San Francisco jail, charged with large-scale money laundering and receiving seventy-two million dollars directly from Timoshenko ….” “Lazarenko granted Timoshenko the provincial energy concession, making her de facto boss of hundreds of state enterprises, which functioned or shut down operations at her whim.”
“Timoshenko’s big break, however, came on the day of my mugging, when Lazarenko was appointed prime minister of Ukraine. One of his first moves in office was to wrest half a dozen lucrative energy concessions from several big private groups and give Timoshenko a nationawide monopoly on the import and distribution of Russian natural gas. “
“Thus UESU was born, and Timoshenko gained control over nearly 20 percent of Ukraine’s gross national product, an enviable position that probably no other private company in the world could boast.”