RISE OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE: KGB BOSS ANDROPOV WANTED ME LIQUIDATED

Aug 22 2005

HEARTS TYCOON TELLS HOW HE WAS TARGETED AS HE TRIED TO BUILD BUSINESS IN SOVIET UNION

By Will Stewart

HE HAS a fortune put at £260million, yet little has been written about Hearts tycoon Vladimir Romanov - until today.

The multi-millionaire has chosen to speak for the first time about his extraordinary rise to riches. In an exclusive interview at his seaside home in Lithuania, he reveals how hardship after the death of his Red Army officer father gave him the incentive to pull himself up by his bootstraps.

He tells how he patrolled Scotland's coastline in a nuclear submarine during the Cold War.

And he tells how he was targeted for assassination by the KGB and Russian gangsters as his empire expanded

HEARTS tycoon Vladimir Romanov has told for the first time how ruthless KGB agents planned to assassinate him The multi-millionaire was imprisoned four times by the Soviet authorities as he fought to build his business.

And as his black market trading empire flourished, KGB boss Yuri Andropov - later Soviet leader - put him on a list of businessmen to be"liquidated".

Romanov defied the threats to become a dollar millionaire when Chelsea boss Roman Abramovich was still at school - five years before the USSR fell apart.

In a remarkable, three-part interview, he also reveals how he was kidnapped and threatened with death by gangsters as communism crumbled and crooks fought for control of privatised companies.

The Lithuanian businessman, who has an estimated £260million fortune, talks about his extraordinary rise to riches.

And the normally secretive Romanov, who took over Hearts this year, reveals how his family's hardship after the death of his Red Army officer father gave him the incentive to get ahead.

He married young to Svetlana and after serving on a nuclear submarine in the Soviet Navy, he needed to find work to support his wife and young son, Roman,now also a Hearts director.

The job he was to choose would have a profound impact on his future capitalist inclinations.

He says: "I became a taxi driver for the state, with a yellow Volga cab. It was seen as 'cool' at the time to be a taxi driver. Several types of job in the USSR could lead to extra money and this was one of them The were few private cars and plenty of chances to extract tips from grateful customers. One was a mysterious looking gypsy woman from Moldova who said to him: "I'll pay you extra but you drive me all day and wait for me."

They went from one yard to another privately - and illegally - selling honey to residents and moving on before she was caught.

He evidently caught the bug. Soon, he set up a small army of women with knitting machines to manufacture clothing, which he used his taxi to sell. He saw the market in fake T-shirts.

He says: "I soon had 12 women operating for me privately with machines making the clothes. My women were the quickest and the best. We sold at markets in Vilnius,Minsk and cities in Russia."

Romanov's dilemma was how to distribute his goods through the Soviet Union without being caught.

Ingeniously, he used gypsies who travelled from city to city with fewer restrictions than most Soviet citizens. Soon, the gypsy buyers were demanding 10,000 shirts with fake Montana labels or Marlboro emblems.

His business deals were done in the dark of the night, dodging police patrols.

Romanov says: "I'd leave home at midnight, drive a bit then sleep for two hours in the car. I'd see my first clients at 3amor4am because it was the best time not to be stopped by the police. I'd arrange a couple of big deals with my clients, then perhaps see some more at 8am or 9am."

The threat of arrest - or worse, Siberian hard labour camp - was constant and he was flung into police cells.

He says: "Each night, Svetlana knew I might not be back home. On three or four separate occasions, they arrested me overnight and locked me up in cells in the detention centre."

Sometimes the cops arrested him or hassled him "hoping for some money in return for my release". Other times, it was his black market business rivals who tipped off the police to haul him in.

The country in which Romanov began to make his fortune was one of the world's most secretive, tightly controlled dictatorships. As general secretary of the communist party, Leonid Brezhnev led the Soviet Union from1964 to 1982and kept an iron grip on personal freedoms.

It was only following the break-up of the country in the early 1990s in the wake of reforms instigated by president Mikhail Gorbachev that the KGB were disbanded.

Baltic nations such as Romanov's own Lithuania eventually secured their independence Yet despite the Brezhnev ban on private enterprise, Romanov was doing well.

He says: "The hardest thing for my wife was counting the money.People say money doesn't smell but after the gypsies had carried it across Russia hidden in their underwear and clothing,it stank.

"Svetlana used to say, 'Please don't make me count the roubles. Anything but that'."

But as Hearts are now finding out, while Romanov is exceptionally rich, he is also a stickler for counting the kopeks. He says: "I had to know how much we were making and Svetlana endured her task."

Romanov's reputation for illicit entrepreneurship spread to Moscow.

He says: "I was one of the biggest individual businessmen and entrepreneurs at the time. The then head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, who would become the Soviet leader, put meon the list for 'liquidation'."

That he was not jailed, or worse, is in part due to his ability to cultivate friends in high places.

The KGB sent a top officer to check him out - "luckily he used to bemy neighbour".

At the time, "the KGB would watch me. When I went to the toilet, they would wait outside. A car followed me everywhere."

When he was called to the main hotel in Kaunas, it was teeming with KGB generals.

Romanov recalls: "They were waiting for the main man but he said to me, 'You come first'. I brought some vodka and snacks and asked about the queue of generals outside. 'Ah, let them wait until morning'. We sat in his room all night and we both got drunk."

At the end, though, the secret services official warned him to leave Kaunas as he was under constant surveillance.

He wound up his trading empire and took his young son to Dombai, a Russian ski resort in the Caucasus mountains where he laid low and ran a hotel.

He says: "People like me were trying to destroy the system so by all means they were trying to get rid of us.

"I suppose I was already a dollar millionaire by 1986. This was five years before the collapse of Soviet rule."

Buttheworldwaschangingin Romanov's direction as Gorbachev entered the Kremlin and began the reforms which allowed limited private enterprise in the form of co-operative businesses First in the queue was Romanov, back to his clothing business and now attracting orders for millions of garments.

Where before the authorities sought to crush him, they now hailed him as one of a new breed of co-operative entrepreneurs.

Romanov started to make even more money but to avoid being clobbered by the taxman, he gave cash to his friends so they could open bank accounts.

He says: "My bank manager was horrified. She just didn't know what to do with me. 'Go to another bank', she used to say. 'One just can't earn that amount of money.' "I was thinking about buying a large cargo plane to move my goods around the USSRandneeded a loan. She refused."

Later, he got his revenge - privatising the bank which now forms the cornerstone of a business empire that stretches from Russia to Scotland and Italy

Taken from the Daily Record