Boris Romanovich Rotenberg the Soviet Union. In 1992, he became a professional judo trainer in Helsinki. In 1998, he returned to St. Petersburg. In 2001, he and his brother founded the SMP bank, which operates in 40 Russian cities with over 100 branches, more than half of them in the Moscow area. SMP oversees the operation of more than 900 ATM-machines. Based on his friendship with Vladimir Putin, his company became closely aligned with Gazprom. Mr. Rotenberg is a member of the St. Petersburg Connection, a powerful energy lobby under the leadership of Mr. Putin. He was involved in 20 construction projects for
Robert Rotenberg throughout his career. While in Europe in the early 1980s, he was the managing editor of English-language magazine "Passion, The Magazine of Paris". When he returned to Canada, he and a partner founded and published "T.O. The Magazine of Toronto", which ran for six years and folded in 1988 . After brief stints as a film executive and a CBC Radio producer, Rotenberg returned to law. He and associates Alvin Shidlowski and Jacob Jesin have had a criminal law practice in Toronto since the early 1990s defending, as Rotenberg describes it, "everything from murder to shoplifting." Cases attracting particular attention