- MOSCOW -- A Russian has established
an agency selling that rarest of commodities: a good cover story for adulterous
partners.
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- Aimed primarily at cheating spouses who need an excuse
to get away from home for a day or two, or explain away a lost night after
an unplanned indiscretion, Dmitry Petrov sells copper-bottomed alibis for
as little as £120. Mr Petrov has no office and does all his business
on a mobile phone.
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- But he employs dozens of freelances - doctors, journalists
and actors - who can rustle up a charade in minutes for the right price.
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- One of Mr Petrov's favourite ruses is to present the
errant husband with a certificate that he has spent the night in detox
after drinking one vodka too many.
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- Another, for the more forward-planning man, is to have
an associate collect the client in a car stuffed with fishing rods, on
the pretext that they are off for a weekend's angling.
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- Contrary to popular perception, Mr Petrov says, most
of his clients are women. In one case a woman wanted to spend a week with
a lover on a beach in Turkey. Mr Petrov produced a fake summons from a
faraway court demanding that she give evidence about a car crash she had
supposedly witnessed.
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- The unsuspecting husband took his wife to the train station
only for her to get off at the next stop and hop on a plane with her beau.
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- Mr Petrov has also helped a host of others to get out
of a tight spot since launching Alibi in 1999.
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- Once he arranged a fake set of wedding photos and even
a fake groom for a woman who had lied to her friends that she had got married.
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- Another time he staged an entire make-believe wedding
with a moonlighting marriage official after a couple grew bored of being
pestered by their parents to tie the knot.
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- He has also set up confrontations between a wife, her
husband and his lover in an effort to get the adulterer to return to the
family nest.
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- Asked whether he was ashamed of his work, Mr Petrov replied:
"Imagine how many good people would have survived around the world
if only such an agency had existed in the times of Othello and Anna Karenina."
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- © Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2003.
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