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Stirring Trouble On Sky News: Why Do Russian Oligarchs Mix With Western Politicians?

October 30, 2008

[flv w=420 h=340]http://www.stirringtroubleinternationally.com/video/nekrassovskyinterview.flv[/flv]

I have been contributing to Sky News for the last fifteen years at least. It is one of the best TV news channels and has some of top professionals working for it. It is always a pleasure to appear on Sky News, not least because they always pay freelance journalists, unlike the BBC, for example, which only pays lots of money to thugs like Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand, and other disgusting characters.

The only thing that slightly saddens me about Sky News is that it has been cutting down on international news in the last couple of years, which is a shame, because they’ve got some of the best foreign correspondents in the world. Look at Alex Rossi in Moscow: he has become, in my opinion, the best Western TV reporter covering Russia. And other foreign-based correspondents of Sky News are very professional too, often outclassing their Western colleagues.

But hopefully things will change and soon international news will return to Sky News on a big scale. Meanwhile we present to you, dear readers, a short interview I gave to Sky News last Saturday concerning the Russian oligarchs. Interest in them has grown recently, after Peter Mandelson’s strange friendship with the Russian billionaire, Oleg Deripaska, became public knowledge. The spotlight on these mysterious high-flyers has further expanded since details of several meetings between Shadow Chancellor George Osborn and Deripaska were leaked by Mandelson’s friends to the press.

In a sense, I’m an expert on the oligarchs because I know some of them personally and I have been writing thrillers that explain how these people amassed their vast fortunes. You won’t find my books in bookshops, though, because I did it mostly for fun and only one book – Saving Ivan – has sold out quietly in major book chains throughout Britain, although, of course, not having a major publisher behind me, the book did not attract much critical attention. It is now out of print.

The second thriller, Russian Roulette, The KGB Novellas, has yet to find its publisher, although you would think that a former Kremlin and Russian government advisor and former consultant and trouble-shooter for some big corporations would know more about Russia, the Kremlin and the KGB, for example, than some big-shot Western hack who has spent a couple of years in Moscow and decided that he knows enough to produce a thick volume about Russian politics and, even more remarkably, books about the notorious Soviet secret police. So I, whom the KGB tried to recruit several times and who has met and dealt with some of the top people in Russian intelligence, know less than some ‘expert’, who has absolutely no idea what he is talking about.

But I’m not bitter. Nowadays, many good books are turned down by literary agent who have no taste and by publishers because many of their commissioning editors are not very bright, so in a sense I can comfort myself with the thought that I’m probably not that bad a writer.

I actually think that my third book, The Debt Collector, which I’m finishing now, will probably be accepted by a mainstream publisher, partly because it is really good and partly because it’s set in post-Putin Russia, which is a novelty in itself.

Anyway, as you will see from my interview with Sky News that we are posting together with this introduction, I sort of know what I’m talking about. And that, hopefully, will make it an entertaining experience for all of you.

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