Veteran hacks like Obiter fondly remember expenses ‘systems’ that comprised a drawer full of banknotes at reception, loosely superintended by an administrator. On presentation of, say, an apparently bona fide taxi receipt, the amount it showed would immediately be honoured in readies. At the Daily Mirror, it was said, roving scribes lived on expenses and banked their salaries. Halcyon days.
We’re always at home to an expenses story, then. And so to a LinkedIn post by an old ‘Russia hand’, solicitor Paul Melling.
Paul, who set up Baker McKenzie’s Moscow office and stayed on in the Russian capital after ‘events’ occasioned BM to shut down, is hanging up his samovar. He bows out with this recollection: ‘So, 16,478 days after my first working day as a member of the legal profession, I begin my last day. How fortunate I have been to have had a job which I truly enjoyed doing – not everyone can say that. There have been challenges. For example, as a young “articled clerk” (trainee, in modern parlance) having to explain to the partners why I had spent £150 of their [business development] budget lunching with a Soviet diplomat expelled that same day for “activities incompatible with his status”.’
Paul also wrote – and we don’t hear this enough – that his career had been ‘fun’. The Gazette last interviewed him in 2015, on the topic of Russia’s anti-monopoly regulator taking an interest in Big Pharma’s presence in the country. Different times.
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