jimbob wrote: ↑Thu Jul 06, 2023 12:37 pm
2b) Prigozhin has discovered that Putin has some really good kompromat on him so he feels he has to throw himself on Putin's mercy?
In Catherine Belton's book
Putin's People, she said that many of the people who had substantial "business relationships" with Putin during his St Petersburg period ended up quietly dead a long time ago. The implication, as she interpreted it, was that they had good kompromat on Putin and needed getting rid of. If he also had good kompromat on them, he couldn't use it without exposing the reverse situation.
Putin was a senior official in the Mayor's office in St P from 1990-96. He had some anodyne title like Head of the Committee for External Relations, with responsibility for business registration, trade and foreign inward investment. But according to Belton, an important part of that was being the main man in the interface between the Mayor and organised crime. He was probably extracting money from them in return for letting them trade in an agreed scope of "business", keeping their rivals out, keeping the gang fights down, etc. This is working from memory as I gave my copy of the book away, so sorry in advance if my memory has distorted that.
That's why I was somewhat interested when I learned that Prigozhin knew Putin through business relations in his St P period, because most people like that fell out of a window 25 years ago, or whatever was the method at that time. Clearly they developed a mutually useful relationship such that Prigozhin was more useful alive than dead.