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A second appearance in Front End this year for former banker-turned-newspaper owner Lebedev.
The self-styled ‘ex-oligarch’, who earned a mention in March for introducing Euromoney to the purported health benefits of buckwheat, has a book out.
Titled Hunt the Banker, it is part-memoir, part rant against the west.
Much of it is devoted to an exposition of Third Colonialism, a theory he has developed with economist Vladislav Inozemtsev, and which he is confident will win them both the Nobel Prize – “unless by then it is being given to those who pay the biggest bribes”.
Euromoney can’t claim to have a thorough grasp of this concept, but it has something to do with an “international financial oligarchy”, of which the “public face” is Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Franklin Templeton, BlackRock, HSBC and Coutts, among others.
China is the good guy, trying its best to stop “the diversion of the wealth of developing countries, which is being exported by corrupt elites and finding a home in bank accounts in London, Paris and Geneva”.
Black holes
Of course, it would be hard to argue that there is no truth in this.