Berezovsky says there were no krysha arrangements: Those gifts - which he doesn’t deny - simply represented his share of the profits of Abramovich’s company at the time, then called Sibneft, a corporate entity that extracts oil and sells it to opaque, offshore companies in Panama, Gibraltar, and Cyprus. Abramovich says he hired Berezovsky as his krysha in the 1990s and gave him a French château and jewelry for his girlfriend as part of the deal. The Russian word krysha, which literally translates as "roof" but now means something like "protection," comes up frequently too. Words like "jet-setting" and "megalomania" get used a lot, and much of the case hinges on verbal deals allegedly struck on large yachts. It’s the lawsuit of the decade, and the London newspapers have been reporting it for months with purple prose and excitable headlines. The former claims the latter cheated him out of more than $5 billion. On the other: Roman Abramovich, currently a Kremlin insider. On one side: Boris Berezovsky, a former Kremlin insider, now an outcast.
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