Because we’d liquidated our assets, these holding companies were empty, so their theft wasn’t a major financial blow. I might have left it at that, but the Russian authorities had opened a criminal case against my colleague Ivan Cherkasov as a pretext for the raids. If Ivan had still lived in Russia, this case would have been disastrous for him. He would surely have been arrested and detained. However, even if he was safe in London, we still had to defend him, or it would come back to bite him.
