Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky will pay 35 million pounds sterling ($56.8 million) in court costs after losing a high-profile case to Chelsea Football Club owner, Roman Abramovich, his lawyers said on Friday.
In the biggest ever private case heard by London’s High Court, Berezovsky had claimed Abramovich betrayed him and intimidated him into selling shares in the Russian oil company Sibneft for a "mere $1.3 billion" in the early 2000s.
Berezovsky sued Abramovich for $5.6 billion in damages, but the judge dismissed his claim in August.
Abramovich, 45, had denied that Berezovsky, 66, was a former business partner and said he was paying him to end an arrangement on “political protection.”
A former Kremlin insider during the rule of late President Boris Yeltsin, Berezovsky told the court his business relationship with Abramovich had broken down after he fled Russia after falling out with President Vladimir Putin. He has lived in self-exile in London for over a decade.
The court process began in October 2011 and involved dozens of lawyers.
Justice Elizabeth Gloster, who presided over the case, described Berezovsky in her final judgment as "an unimpressive, and inherently unreliable, witness, who regarded truth as a transitory, flexible concept, which could be moulded to suit his current purposes. At times the evidence which he gave was deliberately dishonest."
