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It was always a challenge for me to prove that a Russian financial investor can be as successful in the West as back at home in Russia.

In the western world, you can go out, take a boat trip to the Caribbean and so forth, and buy good things with your own money. But the Russian people with rubles cannot do that.

And the Russians certainly don't have it. If a woman shows up in a fur coat, I just assume she's a crook. And that's me, the nice American. The assumption that you can't make money honestly is a killer.

Russia is an amazing country to be an entrepreneur.

I mean that at least 80% of the Russian people feel destitute. It's the people who had their past and future taken from them - they don't get paid - many of them face a wall. They have nowhere to go.

How can a bureaucrat or a politician be trusted if he says loud words for the sake of Russia's good while trying to take his funds, his money abroad?

The government in Russia does not tell me what to do with my assets.

The Russian economy is a one-trick pony. They're totally focused on natural gas and oil.

You have to invest the money in a certain thing, because, you know, at 40, I want to enjoy my life. So I do a lot of investments. Apartments back in Russia and New York. It's a good thing to do.

Business in Russia was not being done like in the West, with contracts. In Russia, hundreds of millions of dollars were going forward and backward by word of mouth.