Chapter 5: The Ivanov report

¶5.59 I observed at paragraphs 4.137 and 4.138 above that there was no particular reason

to think that Mr Litvinenko's role in providing sensitive and damaging information in due diligence reports ever became known either to those who received the reports or to those who were affected by them. That was because it was standard practice in the security industry to preserve the anonymity of sources such as Mr Litvinenko. It followed that – again, in general terms – there was no reason to think that the due diligence reports that Mr Litvinenko provided for the security companies in 2006 played any part in his death.

¶5.60 On the evidence that I have heard, however, there was one of Mr Litvinenko's reports to which this reasoning did not, or at least did not necessarily, apply.

¶5.61 The report in question was one of the reports that Mr Litvinenko and Mr Shvets

prepared for Mr Attew. The subject of the report was a Russian politician and close ally of Mr Putin named Viktor Ivanov.

¶5.62 The basic facts relating to this report appear, from the evidence before me, to be as follows:

a. The Ivanov report was one of a series of reports commissioned from Mr Litvinenko by Mr Attew in about August or September 2006. Mr Attew was unable to remember whether or not the report was the first that he had commissioned from Mr Litvinenko39

b. Mr Litvinenko initially gave Mr Attew a report on Mr Ivanov that was only a third of a page long. Mr Attew considered the report to be far below the standard he expected, and told Mr Litvinenko so. Mr Litvinenko told Mr Attew that the report had been drafted for him by Mr Lugovoy 40

c. Mr Litvinenko then asked Mr Shvets to draft a report on Mr Ivanov. In response, Mr Shvets drafted an eight-page report. Some of the content of the report was information that Mr Shvets had been told by Mr Litvinenko41

d. Mr Shvets completed the report and emailed it to Mr Litvinenko on 19 September 200642

e. A copy of the report is in evidence before me.43 The report contains detailed and serious criticism both of Mr Ivanov and (as Mr Shvets observed) of Mr Putin.44 Mr Attew described the report as "extremely damaging".⁴⁵⁴⁵ BLK000253 (page 10) HMG000308 Attew 13/37 Mascall 9/27-28 INQ019146 (page 15 paragraph 46) In summary:

(i) The report details Mr Ivanov's early career in the Committee for State Security (KGB). It notes that he served in Afghanistan and in the human resources department, and asserts that these postings indicate that he was considered to be an underachiever and a "failure"

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(ii) The report asserts that, whilst posted in St Petersburg (then Leningrad), Mr Ivanov set up businesses and deceived his KGB superiors that they were for operational purposes, whereas he was in fact running them as private ventures

(iii) The report alleges that, during his time in St Petersburg, Mr Ivanov developed close links with the Tambovskaya criminal group and its leader Vladimir Kumarin. It asserts that, as a result of this "murky business association", Mr Ivanov acquired an interest in the St Petersburg seaport, which, it claimed, he still held at the date of the report

(iv) The report asserts that Mr Ivanov was a protégé of Mr Putin, and that the careers of the two men were very closely connected. It asserts that Mr Putin was complicit in Mr Ivanov's dealings with "gangsters" in St Petersburg, and also that Mr Putin himself was involved in assisting a Colombian drugs cartel in a money laundering scheme

e. On about 21 September, Mr Litvinenko told Mr Shvets that he had passed the report to the client, whom we know was Mr Attew 46

f. Mr Attew was very pleased with the second version of the report. He told me that he regarded it as being of "exceptional" quality, and he passed it to his clients47

g. A few days later – Mr Shvets thought it was probably between 21 September and 30 September – Mr Litvinenko told Mr Shvets that a 'Russian source' of his had also produced a report on Mr Ivanov which the client had said was "trash". He added that he had passed a copy of Mr Shvets' report to the Russian source to show him how he should write his reports in future48

h. Although Mr Litvinenko did not tell Mr Shvets, either at the time or at any time before his death, that this 'Russian source' was Mr Lugovoy,49 there is very strong evidence to that effect. Mr Litvinenko did tell Mr Shvets that the Russian source had worked for Mr Berezovsky and had been imprisoned – that fits with Mr Lugovoy. He also, as I have said above, told Mr Shvets that this other source had prepared a report on Mr Ivanov that Mr Attew had rejected – that also fits with Mr Lugovoy, and Mr Attew stated in terms that he only received two Ivanov reports50 – there is, in other words, no other candidate to whom Mr Litvinenko might have been referring. Finally, Mr Litvinenko told Mr Shvets that he had met the Russian source shortly before being taken ill.51 Marina Litvinenko also gave evidence that she believed that Mr Litvinenko had shown the Shvets Ivanov report to Mr Lugovoy52

i. Mr Attew's evidence was that the Shvets due diligence report on Mr Ivanov caused the collapse of the deal that his clients had been considering. He assumed that, as

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a result, Mr Ivanov would have suffered significant financial losses.53 Mr Shvets gave evidence to a similar effect54

¶5.63 The possibility that the Ivanov report may have found its way to the Kremlin via

Mr Lugovoy, and that this may have been linked to Mr Litvinenko's death, was first aired in public by Mr Shvets in an interview broadcast by BBC Radio 4 in December 2006. A transcript of the interview is in evidence before me.55 In the course of that interview, Mr Shvets described Mr Litvinenko giving the Ivanov report to Mr Lugovoy as having "triggered the entire assassination of Sasha."

¶5.64 A similar theory was subsequently proposed in an article in the Novaya Gazeta dated

24 May 2007. That article suggested that the Ivanov report had come to the attention of the authorities in Russia after it had been found in Mr Lugovoy's possession when he was stopped and searched at Sheremetyevo Airport on his return to Moscow from London.56

¶5.65 Is it possible that the Ivanov report triggered Mr Litvinenko's killing, or at least had

some connection with it? One obvious difficulty with this theory is that, on Mr Shvets' evidence, Mr Lugovoy only received the report a few weeks before what appears to have been the first attempt to poison Mr Litvinenko. Mr Shvets was asked about this, but was not shaken from his "positive" belief that the Ivanov report triggered an operation to murder Mr Litvinenko. His reasoning, as he explained it to me, was that such an operation could have been mounted quickly since the Russian security agencies already had access to, and experience in the use of, polonium, as well as inside knowledge of Mr Berezovsky's office, and Mr Lugovoy had easy access to Mr Litvinenko. He believed it to be credible, therefore, that the planning for Mr Litvinenko's poisoning had not started until September (and presumably, on his reasoning, the end of September) 2006.57 He concluded:

"… look, before Sasha was poisoned, he had lived in London for several years, and over this period, he was consistent in making statements, critical statements, against Putin… some of this criticism was very insulting, very personal, and still Sasha was alive. Nothing happened. He was alive and well. And suddenly he was poisoned. So it leads me to believe that we should be looking for something which happened shortly before he was poisoned. Something changed in his life-style shortly before he was poisoned, and what changes? It was the fact that he was fired by Boris Berezovsky, it was the fact that he got involved in other business activities, which leads to the report, et cetera."⁵⁸⁵⁸ INQ017734 (page 12 paragraphs 40-41) Zakayev 26/144-146 Shvets 24/84-85 Krgo 9/54-60 Goldfarb 27/114-115; INQ019146 (page 19 paragraph 60)

¶5.66 In his oral closing submissions on behalf of Marina Litvinenko, Mr Emmerson QC

described Mr Litvinenko's action in giving a copy of the Shvets Ivanov report to Mr Lugovoy as "a fatal mistake". Mr Emmerson suggested that a similar significance could be placed on the fact that Mr Lugovoy knew from his dealings at RISC that Mr Litvinenko had been tasked with investigating Mr Gordeyev, who was, in his words, "a high-ranking official in the Russian government". Mr Emmerson submitted that from the moment Mr Litvinenko gave Mr Lugovoy a copy of the Ivanov report:59

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¶"Lugovoy not only knew that Litvinenko had been tasked to produce a devastating report on Alexei Gordeyev, and that he had been tasked to produce a devastating report which implicated both Ivanov and Putin directly in organised crime, but he had a copy of the report in his hands. It can hardly be a coincidence… that two months later it was Lugovoy who was chosen to be the man to kill Mr Litvinenko. The direct and immediate link to Putin and the Kremlin is just too obvious to ignore."

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