The From a very early age,

From a very early age, I remember being acutely aware that my dad had a lot of money.

Even when we were still living in a small, two-up, two-down terraced house in Garston,

and I had just started school, I remember feeling this deep source of pride that my dad had the best car in the street.

It was the late 70s back then, and the area of Liverpool we lived in was a rough one.

There was a lot of crime, a lot of unemployment, and both my parents grew up in conditions

so squalid that I had to see them to believe them.

But I think that's what made my dad into the man he was.

Growing up, his parents didn't have two pennies to rub together, so by the time he was a young

man, that's all he thought about.

Money, money, money.

I heard that he was a clever lad growing up.

He did well in school and earned great results in his exams, but when it came time to pick

a trade and learn a

skill, Dad announced that he wanted to go to university instead. To him, getting a business or

accountancy degree was the golden ticket to a lifetime of potential good earnings. But after

traveling down to London for his School of Economics interview, he came back with a completely

different plan. In the late 70s, when Dad started his business, Russia was known as the USSR,

and it operated behind what was called the Iron Curtain. And basically this meant that there

were strict export controls and massive bureaucratic hurdles on both sides

if you wanted to trade with them. The process was even more tiresome if you wanted to import old

Russian antiques. But since London was, and still is, home to a very large and very wealthy community

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