The story of Rafa Benitez's Sunday evening at Roman Abramovich's Kensington mansion reveals that you are lured into trusting the Russian at your peril. That vague, seemingly coy countenance he presents is extremely deceptive.
It was January 2013 and Benitez was doing a good job of picking up the pieces at Chelsea when, hours after a 2-1 win over Arsenal at Stamford Bridge, he ended up at Kensington Palace Gardens for a soiree that finished with him playing indoor football with Abramovich's children.
The Spaniard could have been forgiven for thinking he perhaps stood a chance of seeing his temporary management role made permanent, with only three league defeats to follow in the second half of the season.
Roman Abramovich has shown as Chelsea owner he is a ruthless commercial operator
But he never saw Abramovich again. He was released that summer, despite winning the Europa League and guiding Chelsea to a third-place finish.
That's how it always is with Abramovich — the anonymous man we've never heard speak all these years. Who, with the help of the expensive PRs that so many of the wealthy oligarchs hired in London, has confected the ludicrous notion that he is congenial and benign.
He is a ruthless commercial operator. No one should be surprised by his apparent willingness to renege on his promise to write off a £1.6billion debt at Chelsea.
If Abramovich had any sentiment whatsoever, then you imagine his own family history would have moved him to challenge — privately, if not publicly — the destruction of lives, families and homes in Ukraine by his arch protector Vladimir Putin.
Rafael Benitez was released in 2013, despite winning the Europa League that season
Abramovich's grandmother, Faina Grutman, was a Ukrainian, who fled to Russia at the start of the Second World War with her three-year-old daughter, Irina.
A brilliant new piece of reporting by L'Equipe reveals how Abramovich's Lithuanian grandfather, Nachman, was forced from his own native country by Russia, when Joseph Stalin 'Sovietized' Lithuania in 1940.
Abramovich's father, Aronas, and his two siblings were forced to flee their home village of Taurage with their mother. They would never again see their father, who was killed on a construction site while in exile.
But Abramovich seems to have left that kind of detail firmly in the past. He has made his money by always having 'the intelligence to be loyal to the power in place' in Russia, according to one associate who has followed his
