Polonsky’s in jail
(an update to the
Oligarch Smackdown: Live!)
(Sihanoukville, Cambodia) The
protagonist of this
story, a prominent Russian developer and
billionaire, “a Russian Donald Trump”, Sergey Polonsky,
is now in a Cambodian jail, in the small seaside resort
of Sihanoukville, where I visited him. On December 30,
2012, just before the New Year celebrations, his
speedboat was detained after hot pursuit and a few
warning machine-gun salvos by the Cambodian Royal Navy,
and towed to a naval base. Polonsky was arrested and
taken into police custody.
This concluded some ten terrible days
of his life that capped a miserable year. After
Lebedev's assault, Polonsky regressed. That public
trashing broke not only his jeans, but something more
important in his soul. He left for Cambodia, to his
offshore home, but he could not find peace of mind even
on this tiny islet – as small as the Little Prince's
planet – in the company of two gibbons and two wild
cats. His business went astray, unattended: the
contracts he made remained uncompleted, his partners did
not pay him. He tried to jump-start his failing empire:
he leased a string of islands from the state, and spoke
vividly of his plans to create on them a super refuge
for the end of days, when civilisation is to collapse.
In the waters of the Gulf of Siam, teeming with marine
life, the refugees from Moscow and New York will find
food and energy enough , he said.
Meanwhile, he roamed the islands on
his fast and spacious ex-Navy powerboat; he stayed at
and slept on the beach of his uninhabited islands for
days, playing the marooned sailor. Wearing only a sarong
and sporting a knife on a leg strap, tall and barefoot,
tanned and bleached by the tropical sun, this
ex-commando cut an exotic figure, ready to act in a
pirate movie without make-up. This lifestyle was not bad
for him at all: he lost weight, regained his slim waist,
and now looks younger than his forty years, much younger
than he looked a year ago. But he behaved oddly.
A character put of Jack London, he
was quickly turning into a character of Joseph Conrad,
into a Kurtz in the Heart of Darkness. He could
not rest, stayed awake for days and nights on end, ran
from one island to the next; his manners – never very
polished – became rude even for a Russian worthy. He was
outright dictatorial with his staff, giving them orders
and forcing their compliance. They had to jettison his
shirts into the sea as he ordered them to sacrifice to
the sea god, they relate. They also had to cover the
seabed with bottles of the best champagne money could
buy. Perhaps he took the Maya prophecy for the End of
the World a bit too seriously.
He became extremely suspicious; every
boat, every native on the island alarmed him. He slept
with knife in hand, ready to sell his life dearly.
Eventually, he decided to move everything he had to a
lonely uninhabited island – and on his orders his
employees loaded furniture and computers, china and
silver, books and paintings onto his powerboat and
sailed away. What did he plan to do with it all on some
wild, sandy shore? He acted like
Muhammad bin Tughluq, the 14th century
Indian ruler who commanded all the dwellers of Delhi to
march to his new capital Daulatabad, and then march back
a thousand miles.
Anyway, his people had no time to
unload the stuff: Polonsky could not decide which island
to chose. His orders changed every minute: once, all
were to sail with him, later, all were to go back. At
night, he thought there was a vessel approaching;
“Pirates!” he thought, and commanded his crew to lift
anchor and sail away fast-forward.
The crew did not understand what he
wanted, or why he shouted at them. Khmers are not used
to being shouted at. They did not see the vessel he
spoke of, or perhaps did not consider it a source of
danger. The captain and the owner had no common
language, they had no interpreter. Polonsky was in a
state of frenzy, convinced that his boat is about to be
seized by pirates. He commanded the crew to jump
overboard and swim to the shore some twenty or fifty
yards away. Afterwards, he and two of his Russian
employees rode away with great speed.
The captain was vexed at this
forceful ejaculation, and called the Navy. After hot
pursuit, Polonsky was detained and arrested. He did not
understand what the problem was: it was his boat,
his crew refused to follow his orders, so
he kicked them out without endangering their life, and
sailed on. He had suspected that they were planning
grand robbery on the high seas. This was inadequate
behaviour, but the man was far from being in a normal
state: the terrible tension of the past few weeks had
made him uncontrollable.
At first glance, he was just acting
like so many Russian wealthy men who have wreaked havoc
in a Parisian restaurant or on board an Emirates jet.
But he was larger than life, a grim saturnine figure
transcending the norms of civilisation. I could not help
but feel pity for a man passing through such a terrible
life crisis. After all, billionaires are also human;
they are being tempted by their power, but this power is
likely to have limits they did not foresee. They do not
conform to bourgeois norms, for good and for bad, and
when they collapse it is a pitiful sight.
In jail, he calmed down. Not right
away: at first, he refused to apologise to his crew, and
almost broke the prison to pieces. But eventually, he
agreed to make peace. He became a protector of the
prisoners, freely spending his now quite limited
resources helping the needy. He buys them medicine and
bribes the guards to lighten their burden. His fellow
prisoners worship him. Despite the promises to release
him soon, he is still locked up – more than two months
after the event. No doubt he behaved wrongly, but hasn't
he been punished enough? This is the feeling in
Sihanoukville: people hope he will get out and help the
locals now, after learning such a hard lesson.
Portrait of Polonsky:
Sergei Polonsky
is forty, a young man as tycoons go, the first
post-Soviet generation of Russian businessmen.
He
lives in a futuristic penthouse,
perched like a ship’s bridge atop a skyscraper with a
360°
view, high above Moscow. He designed and built the
skyscraper and his own apartment himself, being an
architect by education and profession. He spends his
weekends floating in a converted barge, moored just
beyond the city limits, in the company of a tame racoon,
doing chi kung – Chinese meditation
practice - and voraciously reading
arbitrarily-chosen books. In winter he drives a slim,
high-tech sled pulled by snow-white blue-eyed huskies;
in summer he glides through the deeps on a sea-bob, or
hang-glides over blissful hills.
He has built himself a fortress of
solitude, a stone and glass castle rising from the waves
of a lonely island off the shores of Sihanoukville, not
far from Alain Delon’s home in remote Cambodia. He meets
with Sufi teachers, receives instructions from Zen monks
and chi gung
adepts. He is into esoteric knowledge and mystic
experiences. Originally he hailed from St Petersburg, a
man of humble origin. He grew up as the USSR collapsed
around him; he studied architecture, went into
construction and building, hired Ukrainian builders
while they were still inexpensive, and built himself
into a real estate developer.
He is proud of being a self-made man;
he obtained nothing from the state, and never sought
anything, he says. He did not privatise government
factories, but instead established good connections with
City Hall and catered to newly-prosperous Muscovites. He
looks honest enough to buy a used car from, though such
trustworthy guys do not become billionaires. People in
the know say that he had to cut backroom deals with Mme
Baturina, wife of the Moscow Mayor and one of the
richest women in the world: no building was erected in
Moscow without a nod from her.
Polonsky
has tried to avoid politics; he professes a lack of
knowledge and interest in things political. He is a
builder, he says, no more. He puts his soul into huge
projects spreading from Moscow to Switzerland and from
London to Croatia. He is democratic in the Russian
style: he mixes easily with all kinds of ordinary folks,
but they’d better follow his orders or else. He
is a petty tyrant, his (dismissed) employees say: he
forbids texting during board meetings! Violators have
their precious iPhones smashed against the wall (a feat
I myself have only dreamed of). His ambitions lie in the
spiritual sphere, and business often takes a back seat
to his search for God.
Polonsky
had gotten himself into trouble, as do all the oligarchs
at one point or another. He was not thorough and he was
not prudent. He rejected his trusted advisors and
surrounded himself with yes-men. He believed his hunch
instead of counting odds. He jumped into multimillion
deals with a bow and a handshake, and his partners
walked away with chunks of his empire. His dreams of
samurai honour were shattered by modern Russian business
pragmatism.
He relied upon his assistants, and
they robbed him blind. The more he empowered them, the
faster they would vamoose with his money. His vast
capital (assessed at over three billion dollars at the
peak) began to shrink precipitously; cash flow became a
problem for him, he was over-extended and had difficulty
completing his most ambitious projects. Ordinary people
who invested in his projects had become justifiably
angry.
At that point he
had his quarrel with Lebedev, and departed for the
Cambodian island. Now it seems
he is finished, but such guys are great survivors. He is
a lucky devil, and I would not be amazed if he were to
rise again in the world.