More than a moghul

Alexander Lebedev is looking pensive as he settles into a chair in his Moscow office. “I’ve been thinking about the theme of our interview and I’ve come to some conclusions,” he says in flawless English. Oh, good. And what are they? Lebedev frowns. “I don’t have a management style and I’m not a good manager.” Hardly the opening Monocle had expected – or hoped for – but very little is predictable in the figure of Alexander Lebedev: ex-politician, businessman, newspaper magnate and one-time KGB spy.

His reception room is bland enough: chintzy curtains, a beige sofa and a few prints of the Kremlin under snow. Then, on a sideboard, something curious: “Oh, yes, those are penis sheaths from New Guinea,” says the owner of UK newspapers the Independent and the Evening Standard, picking up the smallest in a row of slender, decorated gourds. “Wonderful, aren’t they?”

His profile suggests a brash tycoon rather than an amateur anthropologist. Lebedev, 51, is chairman of the board of National Reserve Corporation, one of Russia’s most successful private companies. In March this year Forbes magazine listed him as the 44th richest person in the country with assets of $2.1bn. Yet Lebedev sees himself as a cut above the average oligarch that’s typically seen swigging champagne and mowing down babushkas in a Bugatti Veyron. His clothes, too, are more hipster than billionaire banker: a black shirt with black pencil tie, grey jeans and Converse trainers.

The image of a cultured contrarian, however, must conceal some business nous. Lebedev bought National Reserve Bank, a small Russian outfit, in 1995. Today it is the centrepiece of a large company which sprawls across Europe’s biggest potato producer to commercial airlines, a luxury hotel in Crimea, a property agency and the media holdings, which include Russia’s most biting opposition newspaper, Novaya Gazeta.

His bank survived the country’s financial meltdown in 1998 and he emerged relatively unscathed from the recent global crisis. So what’s the secret? When pressed on his method of managing, Lebedev offers, “In some ways, the more efficient you become as a manager and the higher you go, the less attractive you become to me as a person.

“You have to run your business with a firm hand, which personally I do not like, because I’m afraid that it’s going to spoil me. I’ve seen a lot of rich guys who claimed, probably justifiably, to be good managers, and I couldn’t say I liked them really. They do a lot of rough talking, because you really have to be tough. Especially here [in Russia], where the attitude to hard work has been lost. So people really have to be reprimanded. People have to be under control permanently, have to be reminded that doing their job is obligatory.”

Most important, says Lebedev, is accepting your own limits and “employing people who have a better understanding than you on certain subjects, people who are faithful, who you can rely on. Because when you sit in your shop in the souk in Aleppo you control everything, the only risk is that you sell your spices too cheaply. Once you get bigger, though, you have to delegate.”

As an example, he describes Andrei Samoshin. “He used to be a sniper in Afghanistan protecting Pavel Grachev, the [Soviet] army chief,” Lebedev explains. “A lot of those veterans ended up in the criminal world in the 1990s so he rather surprised me.” The two met in the Tula region in western Russia and served for a few years together as federal MPs from the Fair Russia party. When they left parliament, Lebedev discovered his colleague was an agrarian by training, and took him on as CEO of his grain and potato business. “I’ve only achieved something in agriculture through good managers like Samoshin,” he says. Sometimes, he admits, his intuition lets him down. His German airline, Blue Wings, went bankrupt last year. The reason was simple, Lebedev says. “I chose the wrong people to run it.” (The management team blames him.)

How does he incentivise hard work? “I’m considering bringing in an employee share ownership plan, and there are other bonuses,” he says. Besides an annual New Year’s Eve party, however, he feels little need to meet large groups of employees. “I really can’t imagine myself dealing with hundreds of people on a daily basis,” he says. “I have a feeling I stop thinking. I’m much better in a distanced, strategic role.”

As for his newspapers, the former MP in the pro-Kremlin United Russia party claims not to bother the editors, making only the odd call to enquire about coverage. “I visited the Guardian a couple of times recently and the Independent asked why I hadn’t met them instead,” he says. “I replied, ‘You didn’t invite me.’” Lebedev says he believes passionately that the UK media can heal itself after the phone-hacking scandal at the News of the World. Such subterfuge was “illegal and morally wrong”, but he warns against increased state regulation of the press. “Look at state control over the media here,” he says of Russia’s supine TV channels.

In the near future, he hopes to focus his energies on a fund for investigative journalism. One target will be sleaze in Russia. “With Novaya Gazeta I’m already shooting myself not so much in the foot; it’s worse than that, it’s both feet,” Lebedev says. The newspaper’s probing reports are constantly riling state officials who can threaten his business, he says. “But big ideas like this – to expose corruption – are much more important to me than the day to day management. This is my mission, to do something useful.”