Berezovsky v Abramovich

Berezovsky v Abramovich [2012] EWHC 2463 (Comm) is an English contract law case, concerning the formation of a contract that is informally made, and where evidence is contested.

Berezovsky v Abramovich
CourtHigh Court
Full case nameBoris Abramovich Berezovsky v Roman Arkadievich Abramovich
Decided31 August 2012
Citation(s)[2012] EWHC 2463 (Comm)
Court membership
Judge(s) sittingGloster J
Keywords
Contract, formation, uncertainty

The case is notable, as it involved two of the Russian oligarchs, and was a direct consequence of the privatization in Russia that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Facts

Boris Berezovsky, known as one of the "Russian oligarchs" who became rich under the presidency of Boris Yeltsin, claimed that in 1995 he had made a contract with Roman Abramovich. Berezovsky alleged that the agreement was that he would share in half the profits generated by Sibneft, a Russian oil company. In 2001, he alleged that he was forced to sell his stake in the company because of threats made by Abramovich when Vladimir Putin’s government came into power. Abramovich denied any of this was true. The essence of the case was whether there was any credible evidence that an agreement had in fact been made.

Judgment

Gloster J, in the Commercial Court division of the High Court, held that Berezovsky was not a credible witness, there had never been a certain agreement intended to be enforceable, and there were no threats.

Significance

The case was the last where Lord Sumption acted as a barrister. He delayed his appointment to the UK Supreme Court so that he could finish his work on the case. A year later, Berezovsky allegedly committed suicide by hanging himself.[1]

gollark: My "fix" is this:```lua--[["Fix" for bug PS#E9DCC81BSummary: `pcall(getfenv, -1)` seemingly returned the environment outside the sandbox.Based on some testing, this seems like some bizarre optimization-type feature gone wrong.It seems that something is simplifying `pcall(getfenv)` to just directly calling `getfenv` and ignoring the environment... as well as, *somehow*, `function() return getfenv() end` and such.The initial attempt at making this work did `return (fn(...))` instead of `return fn(...)` in an attempt to make it not do this, but of course that somehow broke horribly. I don't know what's going on at this point.This is probably a bit of a performance hit, and more problematically liable to go away if this is actually some bizarre interpreter feature and the fix gets optimized away.Unfortunately I don't have any better ideas. Also, I haven't tried this with xpcall, but it's probably possible, so I'm attempting to fix that too.]]local real_pcall = pcallfunction _G.pcall(fn, ...) return real_pcall(function(...) local ret = {fn(...)} return unpack(ret) end, ...)end local real_xpcall = xpcallfunction _G.xpcall(fn, handler) return real_xpcall(function() local ret = {fn()} return unpack(ret) end, handler)end```which appears to work at least?
gollark: Fixed, but I don't really know how or why.
gollark: ... should I create a bug report?
gollark: It returns two, actually. The second one. I don't know *what* the first one is doing.
gollark: Is this some weird implementation thing or is Lua actually defined/specified to work like this?!

See also

Notes
  1. "Boris Berezovsky 'found with ligature around his neck'". BBC News. 28 March 2013.
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