Sabre Sunglasses

One of the pre-Christmas tests for the tall tales which Miller (right) and Belton (left) have been telling about Russia for years is generally known as truth value, aka evidence. Of that there is next to none in Miller’s book. It’s not even news that the big London-based law firms operating around Russian dealmaking lack elementary honesty and competence, and brandish libel litigation threats to cover up their profit-taking from their clients’ wrongdoing.

The narrator and hero of Miller’s tale is a 30-something lawyer who botches his fiduciary and professional duties in two transactions – one, a Moscow apartment fraud in which he loses $25,000 of his own money; and the other, a $500 million bank loan to a logistics group for constructing a terminal for loading crude oil on tankers on the Barents Sea, near Murmansk. Miller’s hero introduces his tough accountancy and accountability standards when he has a row with a gypsy cabdriver for charging 200 roubles – “daylight robbery”. But when the lights go out, our hero fails in the A & A department: in the first transaction, because he’s having sex with one of the fraudsters (female, called Masha); and the second, because the logistics company owner (male, called “the Cossack”), helps get him and his girlfriend past face-control at a Moscow nightclub, the old Rasputin.