BORIS BEREZOVSKY’S present has now been returned. One day in 2007 Mr Berezovsky (pictured left), the exiled Russian oligarch, pounced on his onetime business partner and now sworn rival, Roman Abramovich, in a Hermès boutique in London. “I have a present for you,” Mr Berezovsky reportedly said, serving him with a writ for what would become a $5 billion lawsuit—the largest in British history. Today, after a four-month trial last year, Judge Elizabeth Gloster announced her verdict, siding wholly with Mr Abramovich and dismissing Mr Berezovsky's claims “in their entirety”. Whatever evidence Mr Berezovsky and his associates presented, Mrs Justice Gloster wrote in her judgment, was “vague, internally inconsistent, exaggerated and, at times, incredible.” At its core, the case centered on whether, as Mr Berezovsky claimed, Mr Abramovich threatened him into selling his share of the Russian oil major Sibneft, along with other assets, at a greatly undervalued price after Mr Berezovsky fell out with President Vladimir Putin and fled Russia in 2000. (Mr Berezovsky parted with his stake of Sibneft for $1.3 billion in 2001; Mr Abramovich sold his own stake of the company for $11.9 billion in 2005.) For his part, Mr Abramovich said that Mr Berezovsky never owned a part of Sibneft at all, but rather that Mr Abramovich paid him for krysha, which literally means “roof,” but in the world of Russian business suggests a combination of access, protection, and generally making sure the necessary things happen and the unwelcome things don’t. There was a sad, Shakespearian feel to the whole trial, with the unmistakable sense of an apprentice outpacing his onetime master: in the mid-1990s it was Mr Berezovsky’s political connections that made him a necessary partner for the upstart Mr Abramovich; by the early 2000s, however, with Mr Berezovsky on the outs with the Kremlin and living abroad, it was the ascendant Mr Abramovich who wielded the upper hand. The trial was, at times, a salacious and outlandish spectacle, providing a rare look inside a rough-and-tumble business world that is usually hidden behind high estate walls and layers of lawyers and bodyguards. Testimony was peppered with all the colorful details of high-stakes commerce, 1990s-Russian-style: huge tabs for mistresses, chartered private jets and villas on the Côte d’Azur. That kept the courtroom packed with Russian journalists even after their British colleagues lost interest. If it could be said that Mr Berezovsky had a legal strategy, it was to make the whole case a kind of metaphorical referendum on the Putin era, a political matter rather than a commercial one, in which the supposed strong-arm tactics of Mr Putin were the real matters on trial. He cast himself as a magnate who fell afoul of the powers-that-be in the Kremlin and then saw his business empire taken from him—not all that dissimilar to, say, the now imprisoned former Yukos chief Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Perhaps he thought he would be a more sympathetic plaintiff if he was not the victim of a murky business arrangement gone bad, but of some kind of personalised persecution. (He stuck with that approach to the very end: outside of court after the verdict, Mr Berezovsky said he had “the impression that Putin himself wrote the judgment.”)

Whatever Mr Berezovsky’s exact strategy, it certainly failed. The court made its decision narrowly on the facts, the best it could understand them. Mrs Justice Gloster was scathing in her criticism of Mr Berezovsky, calling him an “unimpressive, and inherently unreliable, witness, who regarded truth as a transitory, flexible concept, which could be moulded to suit his current purposes.” Her excoriation of Mr Berezovsky goes on for two pages, concluding that the “bottom line of my analysis of Mr. Berezovsky’s credibility is that he would have said almost anything to support his case.” Her assessment of Mr Abramovich, however, was more glowing. He “gave careful and thoughtful answers,” the judge wrote, calling his conduct as a witness “meticulous” and “frank.”

Clearly, Mr Abramovich, wherever he is—he was not in court today—is drinking champagne tonight. Who really won, though, and who lost? Even more than Mr Berezovsky, it is possible to say the Russian taxpayer has emerged as the real loser. The trial produced hours of testimony about state property sold off in the most opaque of ways, with profits from those sales then reinvested to influence domestic politics. The real winner in this battle is harder to identify. Both men saw their reputations and personal histories tainted with the emergence of uncomfortable and unflattering details. And the trial certainly did not help to improve Russia’s already troubled image as a place where doing business is a strange, messy affair not worth all the associated drama.

In the end, tonight’s drinks should not necessarily be courtesy of Mr Abramovich, but on the tab of both men’s British lawyers, the real victors of the saga. They took home untold millions in fees. Outside court today, Mr Berezovsky says he is considering an appeal—surely worth a toast in the halls of the City’s law offices this evening.