Russian spies looking for loot from expats

Times:

In his last investigation before he was murdered, Alexander Litvinenko claimed to have uncovered a plan by the Russian Federal Security Service to claw back millions of pounds from wealthy Russians who fled to London and other Western capitals.

Most of the exiled executives are said to have worked for Yukos, the $10 billion energy giant seized by the Kremlin. Litvinenko had visited some of the alleged targets to warn them that the Russian intelligence services planned to intimidate them and their families to recover millions of dollars.

He also claimed to have discovered the amount of money that those on the list were expected to hand over, and that teams of Russian agents were being sent abroad to track them down.

Most of those on the list already knew the danger they faced: a number of former Yukos officials have been murdered or jailed or have disappeared in recent years.

Stephen Curtis, the British managing director of a company that had been the main shareholder in Yukos, died in a helicopter crash close to his palatial home in Dorset in March 2004. He died a fortnight after he went to Scotland Yard saying that he had received death threats. He told detectives that he feared that a hit team had been sent from Moscow to assassinate him.

Yuri Chaika, the Russian prosecutor-general, who has taken over the investigation into the Litvinenko affair, has been conducting a fresh inquiry in Moscow into the Yukos affair. Official approaches that President Putin has made in the past three years to Whitehall and other Western governments has, however, failed to persaude them to send back a single person on the Kremlin’s wanted list.

Mr Chaika announced this week that he was extending his Yukos investigation until March, although Russian officials do not expect governments such as Britain to change their minds. Mr Chaika might now use the Litvinenko affair as an excuse to send prosecutors to London to seek access to exiled Russian millionaires.

At least a dozen former Yukos personnel have been given asylum in Britain, including a former vice-president, Alexander Temerko, and senior figures such as Dmitry Maruyev and Natalia Chernyshova, whom the Russians have charged with fraud. All deny any wrongdoing. Three attempts by the authorities in Moscow to have the 12 sent back to Russia were blocked by the English courts.

Litvinenko claimed in his dossier that the FSB decided to take matters into its own hands to recover billions of dollars through a covert campaign of intimidation, dirty tricks and murder. He flew to Israel in secret weeks before he was murdered to meet Leonid Nevzlin, one of the most wanted of the targets.

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There is more. The Russian spies appear to be spinning an interesting web of intrigue. James Bond would be impressed.