Prigojine Liquidation Confirms Fate of California Banker Sergey Grishin

The death of Sergey Grishin of alleged sepsis in a Moscow hospital concluded intense cross border personal litigation centred on revelations about the oligarch’s private life and which in turn was to lead to his liquidation.

Oceania’s leading web site on legal topics Lawfuel had picked up details of the banker’s domestic life and it was now that the California-based oligarch sought to close down such intrusions by making an example of the Wellington-based Lawfuel site.

The saga involved white shoe law firms on both sides of the Pacific in a case that occupied New Zealand’s own High Court and saw orders for seizures of computers and documents at large as the oligarch exploited every avenue available to discover the source of the stories about him that by now were appearing in Fleet Street.

The ferocity of the oligarch’s focus on Lawfuel prompted New Zealand’s National Press Club to make submissions to the nation’s Law Commission and to do so in tandem with its New York - based affiliate the Overseas Press Club.

The doggedness of the oligarch’s pursuit of Lawfuel continued to the end and was marked most recently by orders served on the site’s host in the United States.

Sergey Grishin was constantly associated with the intervention at the time of the collapse of the old USSR with plundering its central bank in a series of opportunistic manoeuvres.

More certain is that rather later he somehow achieved a large measure of control over the Rosevro bank and at a time when Western money poured into Russian energy.

The Rosevro bank, still a mid-level Russian trading bank, was a leader in transferring this money back to the West.

Furnished with a slice of these funds Grishin now moved to California where Grishin busied himself with a content factory for the tittle-tattle sphere of social media.

He and his wife became society figures, a profile capped when Grishin sold at a discount according to realtors his Montecito estate to Harry and Meghan.

Even now, and even after the rather brutal details of his marriage melt down started to appear in the feminist press and as far afield as New Zealand Grishin might have side stepped the long arm of the Kremlin.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine changed this for Grishin who found himself having to condemn it, and to note also that he wanted a United States passport.

Along with scores of others he now went on a list of miscreants who had caused hindrance or embarrassment to the Kremlin autocracy.

He too now became liquidated under a procedure of plausible deniability in which the manner of his demise shrouded the outcome which was a blunt warning to others to keep their heads down.

How was Grishin lured back to Russia?

Now we find a similarity with the extinction of Evgeny Prigojine tempted back by the Kremlin by redemptive promises of spearheading the Kremlin insurrections in Africa.

Prigojine was confident enough to have carelessly omitted sweeping his own Embraer aircraft for remotely activated and barometric bombs.

Grishin was no Prigojine. Significantly though his demise came when Russia is anxiously demonstrating to China that Russia must be considered an equal partner in the de-dollarisation scheme, the one to replace the USD as the world currency.

Grishin with his high profile in California and surrounded by an aura of having broken the Russian central bank plus his proven laundering of Rosevro money was walking, talking evidence of Russian banking porosity, unreliability, and above all, vulnerability.

His sale of the Montecito estate to the Sussexes for the price of a Sydney or Auckland “mansion” had failed to elevate him to royal circles.

Cafe society in California seemed more preoccupied with his domestic affairs rather than his ability as an international currency manipulator.

So when the Prigojine forgive and forget format call to Grishin came from Moscow to do big things there such as leading the development of the new world reserve currency……………………