I knew President Yeltsin well. He would never have tolerated government officials demonstratively showing off the millions they acquired through corruption, the way it's done today.

People take the lazy way out, and do not regard Putin and the Kremlin as the real enemy. They create a long but erroneous chain in their heads. Putin is the leader of Russia. Putin does X, therefore Russia is doing X, and Russia is our enemy. And so, we introduce sanctions, for example, against Russia.

Large companies cannot finance political parties as their shareholders and employees have different political views.

I am working in my office. I've got a boss who tells me what to do. He's got a boss who tells him what to do. And above him is another boss who probably is telling my boss in the same way - or my boss' boss in the same way what to do. In actuality, this is not the way things work. Management science says that that kind of a chain doesn't work more than three levels up.

To admit guilt for nonexistent crimes is unacceptable to me.

If we talk about changes of power in Russia, that has occurred several times in the past century. After Stalin came Khrushchev, who implemented his legacy quite radically, one could say. But there was no blood, nonetheless. After Brezhnev came Gorbachev. I'm not talking about the ones who were in power for only a short period of time. Gorbachev, too, left a very radical legacy.

What's important to me now is to uphold my good name and achieve a fair court decision - the past cannot be recovered anyway.