How I survived grenades, bullets and gangsters: Ex KGB colonel turned banker ALEXANDER LEBEDEV on making billions in Putin's wild west Russia
A particular deposit made at the bank I owned in Moscow one August night in 1996 was unexpected, unwelcome and life threatening.
It was a hand grenade, which smashed through the window and exploded, seriously injuring one of the security guards. Plastic explosive was also discovered laid at the corner of the building.
Then I arrived at my office one day to find a hole in the window, a spent bullet on the floor and a mark where it had struck the wall — at the level my head would have been if I’d been sitting at my desk.
Someone — a gangster or a fraudster or someone put up to it by the authorities — was obviously trying to intimidate me, though who and precisely why was unclear.
The police went through the formalities, made cursory investigations and even tried to falsely implicate our own security guards before, surprise, surprise, walking away from the case. I’d get no protection from them.
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