A consultant to a company owned by Oleg Deripaska, Russia’s richest man and a friend of British Business Secretary Peter Mandelson, was involved in an elaborate plot to use Leeds United football club and several members of parliament as pawns in a propaganda campaign against one of the oligarch’s rivals.
According to documents exhibited in the High Court, an obscure London-based public-relations firm called Mirepco was employed to mount a smear campaign against Michael Cherney, who is suing Deripaska for a share in one of his businesses worth some US$4 billion.
In a letter to Sam Berkovits — a legal consultant to Deripaska’s Basic Element conglomerate, the interests of which span timber, mining and metals — Mirepco outlined its plan for a public relations campaign that would raise “an awareness of the undesirability of granting MC [Michael Cherney] either residential status in the UK, or indeed the right to enter the country.”
The plan allegedly involved leaking false information that Cherney, who has an interest in the Bulgarian club Levski Sofia, wanted to buy Leeds.
“This would lead to a public discussion being started as to his suitability for such an acquisition and enable negative comments to be placed in the public domain,” the Mirepco letter states.
“Once such issues are being publically [sic] discussed and his profile raised, we would arrange for UK experts and commentators to denigrate MC as being unsuitable for controlling an English league club,” it said.
The plan, for which Mirepco charged £10,000 (US$17,300) per month, was to leak the information in August last year, “given the slow pace of news.”
“The national tabloid newspapers would then be contacted, as they can in certain cases be ‘persuaded’ to publish less than flattering information, particularly about foreign nationals with unsavoury backgrounds,” the letter said.
The firm suggested that the local MP, Colin Burgon, a keen Leeds United fan, “would most certainly not be supportive of a possible takeover by MC.”
Over the following months, the plan took off. Internet football forums became awash with comments from angry Leeds fans worried about rumors of Cherney’s interest in Leeds. It was thwarted only when the club was sold back to the former Chelsea chairman Ken Bates.
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