Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky was severely burned in an explosion which killed his driver in 1994.
As a young man, Berezovsky was a talented mathematician, researcher, and eventually a department head at the USSR Academy of Sciences. Beginning in 1989, he took advantage of government reforms to go into private business, first with automobile sales and later into other industries including media, oil, and air travel.
On June 7th, 1994, a remote-controlled device exploded inside a blue Opel parked near a gate just as Berezovsky’s vehicle departed. Berezovsky survived the attempt, and the investigation was assigned to Alexander Litvinenko at the FSK, soon to be renamed the FSB. He initially theorized the culprits were connected to the VAZ automobile manufacturer, which Berezovsky intended to take over and privatize.
However, there were no arrests or prosecutions in the case. Litvinenko would later flee to the UK in 1998 after publicly speaking out against corruption in the FSB and even claimed that Berezovsky’s attackers had been with his own agency.
By 1997 Berezovsky’s fortune was estimated by Forbes to be $3,000,000,000. He was one of the most powerful men in Russia, a strong ally of President Boris Yeltsin, and later Vladimir Putin as well. But following Putin’s rise to lead Russia, which he’d helped arrange, Berezovsky quickly fell out of favor.
In the year 2000 he moved to the United Kingdom and was granted permanent asylum in 2003. Over the coming years he worked to undermine Putin from abroad and worked closely with Litvinenko. He paid Litvinenko’s living expenses following his arrival in the UK, and Litvinenko later became a paid consultant for MI6 until he was famously killed with Polonium-210 in 2006.
In March 2013, Berezovsky was found dead in a country estate outside London with ligature marks from a scarf knotted around his neck. The Home Office pathologist ruled he had hanged himself, but another well-known pathologist, Professor Bernd Brenkmann, reviewed photographic evidence and claimed it appeared Berezovsky was strangled and then hung by the scarf afterwards.