Irina Abramovich: Because she's worth it

The singer Cesaria Evora is hugely popular in Russia, and when she played the Vasiliev Theatre in Moscow a few years ago, Irina Abramovich was one of the many who was keen to be there.

The good news was that one of the organisers had reserved 20 tickets to the show for her husband's oil company, Sibneft. The bad news was that none of them was for her. It was made clear that she was expected to stay at home and look after the children.

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Roman Abramovich is clearly one of those men who, once the girl has sunk into his arms, wants her arms in the sink asap. But as the rumour-mill went into overdrive about her husband's friendship with the 25-year-old Russian former model Daria Zhukova, it emerged last week that, after 16 years of marriage, Irina had finally had enough.

After raising the spectre of a very public and embarrassing legal action by consulting London's most feared firm of divorce lawyers, Sears Tooth, she eventually settled for a "consensual" settlement through the Russian courts.

Initial estimates indicated that she had secured a lump sum of £1bn-£1.5bn, but what are likely to prove more reliable reports from the Russian press suggest the figure may be closer to £150m. Whatever the truth of the matter, she has become one of London's most eligible divorcees overnight,

However, potential suitors looking to bone up on her background will find thin pickings. The wife of the man once known as the "stealth oligarch" doesn't talk to the press - and neither do her friends. But in the process of researching our biography of Roman Abramovich, Chris Hutchins and I did manage to make some headway.

The woman born Irina Malandina may have grown accustomed to a life of cartoon-like extravagance involving private airliners, yachts as big as ferries and palatial homes all over the globe, but her early years were marked by grinding poverty.

While both of Roman's parents had died by the time he was four, he was taken in by his relatively affluent uncle. Irina's misfortune was to lose her father, Vyacheslav, to an industrial accident when she was just two, and she was brought up by her widowed mother Alla, who scraped by on the 120 roubles a month (then about £60) she earned by working long hours as a waitress.

Fortunately for Irina, when the time came for her to enter the world of work, one of her aunts was an air hostess with Aeroflot and was in a position to put in a good word for her attractive young niece. The result was that Irina not only got a job but was put straight on to the international roster, thereby avoiding an unglamorous apprenticeship on domestic flights.

And, under communism, a job as an air hostess attracted none of the trolley-dolly sneers common in the West. It was recognised to be a privileged occupation as staff were in a good position to exploit their access to scarce Western consumer goods. They were also well placed to find eligible husbands as they mingled with the jetset in the departure lounge. And Irina, who was 23 but looked 17, was already looking something of a catch.

"She was a beauty," says Larissa Kurbatova, a fellow Aeroflot air hostess, "huge blue eyes, a straight nose, luscious lips." She certainly made an impression on Roman Abramovich, then a young hustler making frequent trips abroad and to provincial towns with consignments of contraband designer goods. He duly handed over his business card, the pair got together, and within months they were married.

Their first child, Arkady, arrived a year later, and they went on to have four more. As we have seen, Roman was keen for his children not to be brought up by an army of childminders, but Irina's maternal instincts have always been strong. After confiding to an Aeroflot colleague that she had grown up without a father, she said: "My children will never suffer like that. I will do everything to make sure that they grow up in a well-off family and that they prosper in life."

Even when she later studied for a degree in history of art at Moscow University, friends attributed it to a desire to educate her children rather than an attempt to carve out an identity of her own. "They visit a lot of galleries on their trips abroad," says one, "and Irina wanted to be in a position to explain to the kids what was going on."

But in recent years some have detected a certain dissatisfaction with what the Russians call the zolotaya kletka, or golden cage, in which she lives. Apart from Roman's constant need to travel on business and his insistence that she take a hands-on approach to child-rearing, her life is constrained by the ever-present threat of kidnap and the need to move around accompanied by a team from the security company Kroll Associates.

In the face of this, she has taken refuge in retail therapy. London's Sloane Street, where Armani, Gucci, Prada et al all have outlets is described as "the centre of her universe". And a former associate of her ex-husband's observes of her: "It does what it says on the tin: pretty and high maintenance."

Her desire to spread her wings and her growing social confidence have brought her into contact with the celebrity circuit, and she has become close to Geri Halliwell, the former Spice Girl, and Kristen Pazik, the American model wife of the Chelsea striker Andrei Shevchenko. Indeed, she is credited with helping to persuade the Ukrainian striker to leave AC Milan for Stamford Bridge by conducting a concerted lobbying campaign with his wife.

Irina is also friendly with Mohamed al-Fayed, the owner of one of her favourite department stores, Harrods, and chairman of Chelsea's London rivals Fulham FC. Intriguingly, Mr Fayed's 24-year-old daughter, Camilla, is one of Daria Zhukova's London set.

Freed from the rather constrained atmosphere created by her taciturn ex-husband, Irina is free to make decisions of her own - and these include where she will live. There is already speculation that the newly independent divorcee will leave London for France because she is so fond of Château de la Croe, the grand villa near St Tropez that is believed to form part of her divorce settlement. That, however, would involve disrupting the children's education, something even a newly independent Irina is unlikely to want to do.

Apart from the nest egg, the maintenance cheques and a property or two, the most enduring benefit to Irina of getting divorced from the owner of a Premiership team may be the fact that a woman who has never had any particular love of football will no longer be obliged to turn up to watch a tiresome array of matches.

Now it looks as if it may be Ms Zhukova who will feel duty-bound to sit through 90 minutes of Chelsea away to Wigan and the like. At that sight, perhaps even Irina will allow herself a slight smile.

Dominic Midgley is co-author with Chris Hutchins of 'Abramovich: The Billionaire from Nowhere' (HarperCollins)