- There were growing signals in Moscow last night that
Roman Abramovich, the owner of Chelsea Football Club, is to be the next
target in a Kremlin crackdown against Russia's billionaires.
-
- State prosecutors confirmed that they had received an
official request to investigate Mr Abramovich's purchase of the oil company
Sibneft. The call came from Vladimir Yudin, the Kremlin-linked MP whose
demands led to the investigation and subsequent arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky,
Russia's richest man by machinegun-carrying special agents.
-
- Mr Khodorkovsky, then the head of Yukos, the world's
fourth largest oil company, has been held in an overcrowded jail in eastern
Moscow for 12 days on charges that he cheated the state of £600 million
in taxes.
-
- President Vladimir Putin, who is due to attend a European
Union summit in Rome today, has assured investors that he will not try
to reverse the privatisations of the Boris Yeltsin era.
-
- But it is widely believed that he is using the legal
system to pursue the billionaires and crush their political ambitions.
Newspapers are filled with suggestions that the Kremlin is poised to step
up its campaign against the super-rich industrialists, who won their huge
wealth in controversial deals overseen by Mr Yeltsin when he was president.
-
- Mr Yudin, the MP behind the Sibneft investigation, is
widely considered to be a stalking horse for a coterie of hardliners, known
as the siloviki or "men of power". Most are former KGB men now
working in the Kremlin and are believed to have the ear of the president,
also a former KGB agent.
-
- Mr Abramovich snapped up Sibneft, which now generates
hundreds of millions of pounds a year, for around £80 million.
-
- Under Russian law, the prosecutor's office has three
months to decide whether to launch an investigation. If Mr Abramovich is
formally charged, he may request political asylum in Britain, following
the example of his former mentor Boris Berezovsky, another Russian oligarch.
-
- Mr Berezovsky, who is wanted by Russian prosecutors on
charges of fraud and embezzlement, writes in The Telegraph today that political
parties in Russia should boycott next month's parliamentary elections in
protest at what he calls Mr Putin's "creeping anti-constitutional
coup".
-
- Mr Berezovsky had his Russian television interests effectively
nationalised and has been granted political asylum in Britain, which has
shielded him from Moscow's attempts to extradite him.
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- © Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2003.
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