"I will only settle in my favor, " Sapir says of the interminable MOR affair.
Originally Teimuri Sepiashvili, Sapir comes from a Jewish family and grew up in Tbilisi, Georgia.
Sapir has the patience--and the pockets--to outlast any shenanigans of the Russian justice system.
Sapir also won a ruling in 2005 against MOR's filing a false audit concerning a trading contract.
Dressed in black-and-white Versace shirt and shorts, Tamir Sapir comes limping in from his 75-minute morning tennis lesson.
Few of Europe's problems are new, but most have been compounded by the crisis, says Mr Sapir, the collection's editor.
The chief beneficiary of those troubles, say Sapir and his lawyers, is Luzhkov's wife, Elena Baturina, Russia's only female billionaire.
Sapir stopped work on the plant, prompting MOR to reassign the processing of polypropylene to another MOR unit working under an Inteco agreement.
The unraveling of the Sapir real estate empire seemed at first glance like the now all-too-common real estate bloom and doom of recent years.
This defense astonished the lender, GSO Re Onshore, which claimed in a letter to the judge that Sapir had never before raised the issue.
Sapir personally guaranteed the loan, from a Blackstone-controlled fund, at 18% interest, and later revised it to an even steeper interest rate of 20%.
Quijada would endorse a weak version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and the conlanging community includes some of the last true believers in a strong version.
That year the refiner held an international tender supervised by chemical industry experts and selected ftl, a Cayman Islands entity Sapir set up for the polypropylene plant.
Sapir's lawyers appealed in January and lost again in March.
Neither Sapir nor Whorf formulated a definitive version of the hypothesis that bears their names, but in general the theory argues that the language we speak actually shapes our experience of reality.
Judgments in Russia and Stockholm have repeatedly confirmed that "the contract had been signed in compliance with laws and with no violations, " notes Katerina Haslam-Jones, a lawyer in London representing Sapir's firms.
That didn't stop an angry MOR shareholder from smacking Sapir with a lawsuit in 2003 in Moscow, accusing FTL of working on a contract signed by "unknown persons" and threatening to void the agreement.
Indeed, one of the foundational linguistic theories of the twentieth century, which came to be called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, was based in part on the work of Benjamin Whorf, an inspector for the Hartford Fire Insurance company.
Whorf never got an advanced degree, but he took graduate classes in his free time with the anthropologist and linguist Edward Sapir, in the nineteen-thirties, and he devoted his leisure hours to the study of Native American languages.
They claim in court that Sapir has, according to a 2008 medical examination, suffered from a "deteriorating mental condition" since at least 1998 that left him vulnerable to shrewd bankers and lawyers out to take advantage of him.
Sapir's marathon legal proceedings--the 26th judicial hearing in the MOR dispute, an arbitration in London, begins in secrecy in May--opens a window on an enduring feature of Russian life: the bitter battles between clans of politicians and business leaders.
In exchange, Sapir says, bureaucrats like Nikolai Lemaev, a former Soviet minister of petrochemicals, granted Sapir rights to distribute 50, 000 tons of fertilizer and 41 million barrels of oil, equal to less than 1% of Russian annual oil production today.
In the first of the resulting arbitration hearings in Stockholm MOR lawyers did not dispute Russian documents that showed Luzhkov's signature approving the original decree calling for the plant or the existence of a 1995 signed contract between Sapir and MOR's general director.
After all, if our thoughts are necessarily imprisoned by language, as Sapir-Whorf suggests, then the only sensible course of action is to build a roomier, more lavish jail cell with all the amenities an inmate could possibly desire a new language that could make possible new ways of thinking.
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