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THE YUKOS CONNECTION

Shortly after the death of Alexander Litvinenko the British press reported that yet another central London location was being examined for the possible presence of polonium radiation. Litvinenko and Andrei Lugovoy had during one of their meetings reportedly visited an office building at number 1 Cavendish Place, between the shopping districts of Oxford Street and Regent Street. The offices belong to a risk assessment, corporate intelligence and security firm called RISC Solutions Pic. Before adopting its current name the company was known as ISC Global and was headed by a British lawyer called Stephen Curtis.

On 3 March 2004 Curtis was in a private helicopter flying from London to Bournemouth in the south of England. One mile from its destination the helicopter spun out of control and crashed. Curtis, aged forty-five, and his pilot Max Radford died instantly. An inquest jury returned a verdict of accidental death on both men, but it emerged that shortly before the crash Curtis had received death threats and reported that he felt he was under surveillance. He had told a relative, ‘If anything happens to me in the next two weeks, it won't be an accident.’

The source of the death threats was never established, but it was subsequently revealed that ISC was part-funded by two Russian oligarchs, Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Leonid Nevzlin, billionaire owners of the massive Yukos oil company and involved in a long-running battle with the Putin government. They had allegedly paid six million pounds to ISC over three years and had been using it to run a covert propaganda campaign against Putin and his close allies. It was claimed the company had been tasked with gathering intelligence to ‘discredit Putin and those around him’. Most of the named targets were career KGB and FSB men now in positions of power in Moscow. The anti-Kremlin smear campaign was stepped up after Khodorkovsky was arrested in Russia and thrown in jail. Even the coroner at Curtis's inquest conceded that his death had ‘all the ingredients of an espionage thriller’. Two former Scotland Yard detectives ran the security and information side of the business and in February 2006 an ISC insider made allegations to the authorities that the company had been paying serving British police officers to hand over sensitive information regarding Russian oligarchs in London and Moscow. All the charges were denied.

As to why Litvinenko and Lugovoy might have been visiting the firm's headquarters in November 2006, a clue emerged when it was revealed that Litvinenko had held a meeting with Leonid Nevzlin just weeks before. Since the Kremlin had arrested Mikhail Khodorkovsky in 2003 and begun the legal proceedings which eventually bankrupted his £21 billion empire, Nevzlin had been the top man in the Yukos management, living in exile in Israel and part of the diaspora of Russian oligarchs railing against the Putin regime. Litvinenko had reportedly flown to Tel Aviv to hand over another dossier of negative information, this time allegedly revealing damaging details about how the Kremlin had gone about discrediting and taking over Yukos. Litvinenko is understood to have warned Nevzlin that he had uncovered a plan by the Kremlin to claw back millions of pounds from exiled Yukos executives by what one source described as ‘a covert campaign of intimidation and murder’. Three months later, at the beginning of January, sixty-four-year-old Yuri Golubev died in London. He was a senior Yukos executive and long-standing partner of Khodorkovsky and Nevzlin. His body was flown back to Russia; the cause of his death has not been revealed.

Following Litvinenko's murder, Nevzlin was questioned by police. He confirmed that Litvinenko had indeed flown to see him in Israel and that he did receive a file from him, which he had since handed over to the British authorities for examination. As for the contents of the dossier, Nevzlin said, ‘Alexander had information on crimes committed with the Russian government's direct participation. He had only recently given me and my attorneys documents that shed light on the most significant aspects of the Yukos affair.’

If the content of the dossier was indeed damaging for the Kremlin and if it had become known to the Russian security services in October 2006, this could have provided yet another motive for Litvinenko's poisoning.

The Kremlin, however, had a different interpretation. Russian Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika announced that Moscow believed Nevzlin was himself a suspect in the murder. No possible motives were suggested for why he might have wanted Litvinenko dead, but the Prosecutor General's Office said it would be seeking to question him. It would also be asking the Russian investigators due to visit Britain to interrogate eleven senior former Yukos executives who currently live in London. Sources in Moscow were now suggesting that the only way Britain would ever get Lugovoy and Kovtun extradited would be to hand over the emigres and political opponents the Kremlin had long been pursuing in the UK. Chief among these was of course Boris Berezovsky. For Vladimir Putin the Litvinenko affair had at first looked like a dark cloud; now perhaps a silver lining was starting to emerge.