MOSCOW — Boris Berezovsky, once the richest and most powerful of the so-called oligarchs who dominated post-Soviet Russia, and a close ally of Boris Yeltsin who helped install Vladimir Putin as president but later exiled himself to London after a bitter falling-out with the Kremlin, died Saturday.
He was 67 and lived in London, where last year he lost what was billed as the world’s largest private lawsuit in history — an epic battle with another Russian oligarch, Roman A. Abramovich, in which legal and other costs rose to about $250 million.
Berezovsky’s death was first reported in a post on Facebook by his son-in-law, Egor Schuppe, and confirmed by a lawyer, Alexander Dobrovinsky, who said that Berezovsky might have committed suicide.
The lawsuit, in which Berezovsky had brought a $5.1 billion claim against Abramovich in a dispute over the sale of shares in the Russian oil company Sibneft and other assets, ended in a spectacular defeat.
Berezovsky was a leading Soviet mathematician who after the fall of communism went into business and figured out how to skim profits off what was then Russia’s largest state-owned carmaker. He accumulated enormous political influence, becoming a close ally of Yeltsin’s.
With Yeltsin’s political career fading, Berezovsky helped engineer the rise of Putin, who became president in 2000.
After his election, Putin began a campaign of tax claims against a group of rich and powerful Russians, including Berezovsky and oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who remains jailed in Russia.
