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Alexander Lebedev is perched on a corporate sofa in his London HQ, trademark black shirt, sporty green chinos and sturdy black trainers. His son Evgeny owns the Evening Standard and The Independent and he is famed back home in Russia for his backing of investigative paper Novaya Gazeta. We’re surrounded by teetering piles of his books in English and Russian — he’s on the bestseller lists in his native Moscow for publishing salty, outspoken accounts of a rollercoaster business career and run-ins with some of the thugs and extortionists of a post-Communist homeland.

Hunt the Banker: The Confessions of a Russian ex-Oligarch (just out in English), is an account of the thrills and many more spills, that followed his transition from a job in KGB foreign intelligence-gathering, to owner of the National Reserve Bank. It thrived in the deregulated haven of Russian financial services and forged a rapid path for Lebedev to riches and status. At 59, he is part of a generation that spans the poverty of the Soviet era and the free-for-all of post-Communist times.

Hailing from Moscow’s intelligentsia, he had a talent for English (and speaks it fluently, with the modulated, quite posh accent of someone who swotted via the BBC World Service). But he grew up darning a single pair of jeans and standing in queues for basic foodstuffs. The First Directorate (foreign intelligence) of the KGB provided the path for an ambitious young man to an international life – ending up, in the Gorbachev years, stationed in London and gathering economic intelligence.

When privatisation let rip in the 1990s, he had the nous and contacts to swiftly build a new bank — as foreign-exchange controls fell away and opportunities knocked for bankers harvesting the gains of liberalisation.

His personal wealth was well over $1 billion (£810 million) at peak (which is starter-level for an oligarch). “The average billionaire has at least one business jet, six mansions and a yacht or two.”

The luck didn’t last. Lebedev attracted attention of the FSB, Russia’s domestic intelligence service, which has fractured into fiefdoms of interests. His offices were repeatedly raided, he was forced to sell assets (including a stake in Aeroflot and a budget airline he was forced to sell at a knock-down price).

The stand-out tales are of balaclava-wearing thugs raiding his office — and a gunshot through the window marking the wall above his desk. It sounds like the first draft of the next run of TV’s McMafia “I wasn’t a great fan of the show,” he says, shaking his head, “Because it lays the blame too much on the Russians and, let’s be honest, they learned a lot of the tricks from Western auditors and lawyers, who also did very well from this dirty money and still do. So what I want to point out is that the burden of blame has to be shared.”

Hunt the Banker lays bare a world in which the grim violence and comic absurdism you might find in Gogol’s short stories coexist.

At one point the screws are turned on his business in an attempt to get him to leave the country or sell. “A hand grenade smashed through the window and exploded, seriously injuring one of the security guards and leaving a hole in the window. Plastic explosive was also discovered laid at the corner of the building.” Doubtless, it feels funnier in retrospect. “The oligarchs were scared to even say hello to me.” At the bleakest moments, he says he considered taking his own life.

He was even warned of a plot to assassinate him: “But it is not the sort of thing you want to hear, so I ignored it a bit too much maybe.” The threat was real and an attempt was made. “Really, they were trying to force me out because if they want to kill you, you are dead and that is that.”

Occasionally, he sounds rueful. “I used to have 3,000 people working for me: now it is a hundred.” It makes you wonder why he stayed put in Moscow. He laughs, “The question I got once from someone in the Kremlin, was, ‘Look Alexander, you are on a chessboard and considering the square you are on right now, you should be in the South of France or St Tropez or London with a mistress’. But I wanted to fight back —and I do fight, you know that — and also, had illusions that as soon as I left the bank, they would send in an interim administration and that would be the end of my business and me in Russia.”

"I wasn’t a fan of McMafia— it lays the blame too much on the Russians and they learned tricks from the West"

Well preserved and fit, he sits leaning forward into the conversation and throwing conversational curveballs. He muses about the moment he ended up in a televised fracas with the controversial property developer Sergei Polonsky in 2011. “It was a mistake to lose my temper,” he says but he is convinced that a charge of “hooliganism” and protracted court case which followed was “another turn of the screw by foes in the system”.

But is he proud or regretful about the punch-up? “Actually I protected his jaw with my left hand because there are three nerves there you don’t want to hit unless you risk killing or seriously hurting someone. Everyone in the [KGB] First Directorate had to do some training, so you have to be careful. But it was silly of me, because it gave my enemies an excuse to go after me using the courts.”

What does a man who knows the Moscow oligarch scene — “It’s a small city if you keep your ears open, you know a lot” — make of the British Government’s attempts to tackle shady money washing through London through Unexplained Wealth Orders to break through the façade of anonymous front companies?

Lebedev is scornful. “Pah!” he snorts. “Lawyers will find a way around it. Don’t worry about that! Every time a thief arrives in London from Moscow with a few hundred million dollars stolen, the top law firms are there to greet him and if they need to, to get him asylum here.”

His company bought a majority share in the Evening Standard in 2009 and his son, Evgeny, runs the business in London. He says it’s “no secret” that newspaper economics have been testing ever since the acquisition “but I think solutions will be found.” So what would he say to those who have doubts about the burgeoning foreign ownership of newspapers? “I’d say, judge by what they read in them whether they are fair and able to report freely and I think I can say strongly that about any title I have been involved in.“

It raises the question of a 30 per cent stake in the Lebedev titles by Saudi investors. This triggered an inquiry by the Government on public interest grounds, but a court subsequently ruled that the Government had missed a deadline to intervene. The incident visibly irks Lebedev who says: “Even in Moscow, we haven’t seen an intervention like this.” He argues that the sole intention of the Saudi investment is to pump extra money into his titles in Britain “because of the trends in the [newspaper] markets. It is a minority holding with no editorial influence.”

"I think Brexit is self-inflicted damage which is not characteristic for Brits. I don’t understand it exactly"

Critics of the Lebedev family’s media activities seem to suggest there is some Kremlin-backed encouragement of Boris Johnson, as part of a plan to peel Britain away from the EU — a kind of grand conspiracy between Brexiteers and the Kremlin. “To be honest,” he sighs, “I think it [Brexit] is a bit incomprehensible — self-inflicted damage which is not characteristic for Brits. I know I don’t quite understand all the reasons people voted for it even if I think they were not well informed. And an island people is different, I see that, even if I don’t understand it exactly. There’s a small chance — maybe very small — of a second referendum which will give us a different result.”

If Hunt the Banker settles a lot of scores, it’s also a good-humoured account of his own foibles and business failings. He decided to try his hand at “real” businesses (after the financial services escapades), from agriculture and aviation to affordable social housing, a shift that caused him to crash down the Forbes Rich List. His enterprises went south and Lebedev blames a mixture of ingrained corruption and his own misjudgments. “Idiot!” or “Stupid!” are words he applies as often to himself as anyone else. At one point, he spent $200 million setting up factories to build cheap, pre-fabricated houses — only to find the land overpriced. And he had to pay so many bribes to get the homes to building sites on bad roads that all profits vanished.

Often, managers he installed were incompetent or corrupt, too. “I learned I cannot leave people with big money because even the best ones start thinking about it as theirs. Managers are easily tempted to think, I am working 20 hours a day for some guy who is doing well out of this. Why can’t I just help myself?”

He says — with a hint of Russian irony — that he is “free of the burdens of wealth”. He has published two books in Russia detailing the sagas of intricate corruption and wants to make documentaries about them. He’s clearly still rich: “But I don’t like yachts, villas and private jets, whose purpose is to demonstrate an ostentatious superiority”.

Will he hang around in Britain’s changeable media scene, if the foretold Brexit economic damage takes hold? “Well, we’re already suffering from the exchange rate buying paper (for printing) in euros,” he shoots back. “But there is a lot of heat; I don’t think the damage will be so great. There’s a Russian saying I have learned to accept, “Let’s live a bit longer and then we’ll see.”

Hunt the Banker is out now (£20, Quiller). Anne McElvoy is senior editor at The Economist. Jim Armitage is City Editor of the Evening Standard