From the Londongrad archives: Here is Prigozhin’s ex-lawyer, Roger Gherson, in 2017 explaining his thoughts on how people do business in Russia during a UK inquest into the mysterious death of one of his clients: Gherson’s client, Alexander Perepilichny, had dropped dead while jogging near his mansion in Surrey, aged 44. More here on the "Russian system":

Just a reminder that *less than a year ago* UK lawyers working for the guy now toddling around Bakhmut with a machine gun dressed in military fatigues were claiming he had suffered “great distress” from allegations he had *anything* to do with mercenary activity. Here is the section of Prigozhin’s English high court claim where his lawyers outlined the apparently unbelievable and outrageous allegations made against their client in his libel case against @EliotHiggins:

Italy’s policy of vaccinating younger priority workers over the elderly has likely cost thousands of lives, and has made it an outlier among large European countries.

Contrary to the prevailing narrative this is not simply a result of a lack of vaccine supply. @emmevilla of @ispionline has crunched the numbers:
Italy had a similar number of doses as France and Germany. But by mid-Feb those countries had vaccinated over a fifth of their over 80s, while Italy had done just 6%. All three had to navigate issues with the AZ vax.

Still lost in the EU vaccine supplies/exports drama is the fact that Italy has decided to give away a massive amount of its available shots to the least vulnerable parts of its population. Government data released yesterday shows 88% of people aged between 70-79 are still waiting for their first vaccine jab, as are 43% of over 80s. Over 80% of Italy’s Covid-19 deaths have occurred in the over 70s.

A recap of the hat trick of scoops published by the @FT in the last 2 weeks based on leaked documents showing how hundreds of millions of Vatican charity funds were invested in luxury London property via offshore companies, complex "time bomb" derivatives, and pledged for loans. These investments were overseen by Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu, one of the most powerful and feared men in the Vatican who was stunningly forced to resign by Pope Francis late last month over allegations Becciu described as “embezzlement”. He has denied any wrongdoing.

Here is a FT column I wrote about the British investor Nicholas Sleep, who has become something of a cult figure for a younger generation of investors. As a bonus feature here is a thread of excerpts from his letters to clients outlining some important aspects of his thinking. While he is by no means the only investor to have grasped the potential of Amazon early on, he is notable for being early to reimagine a traditional value investing framework to analyse these companies over 15 years ago. Many are only catching up now.

ft.com/content/23590a…

1/ This is a story about modern finance. It begins in a hospital infiltrated by organised criminals in southern Italy and ends in the investment portfolios of clients of a private bank in Luxembourg.
ft.com/content/885058… 2/ It is a story about the rise of the family clans of the ’Ndrangheta from rural also-rans in the world of Italian organised crime to become vastly wealthy, sophisticated and powerful operations that inspire terror in those who cross them.

The most recurring, unchallenged and wrong assumption in financial commentary is that the performance of the stock market is strongly and predictably correlated with the performance of the wider economy. If you question this people think you are insane, or simply an idiot. The second is probably that multiples, such as p/e ratios, are meaningful taken on their own, without reference to other important things. It is like guessing the valuation of a building based just on its height. Looking at aggregate index multiples vastly compounds this error.