MOSCOW, Aug 31: Russia said on Friday it had issued an international arrest warrant for a fugitive oil billionaire who has denounced a campaign of “unprecedented persecution” against him by the Kremlin.
Authorities are seeking the arrest of Mikhail Gutseriyev, CEO of oil major Russneft until he resigned last month following a series of tax fraud inquiries that he said were aimed at forcing him out of the business.
He has since fled to London, according to Russian newspaper reports.
“There is an international arrest order out for him. The information has been passed on to Interpol. We cannot reveal where we think he is,” a spokesman for Russia’s interior ministry said. Interpol’s headquarters in Lyon, France, could not confirm that it had received the order.
Gutseriyev’s presence in Britain could exacerbate diplomatic tensions between Moscow and London, which are already at odds over the extradition of Russian nationals wanted in Russia, such as fugitive oligarch Boris Berezovsky.
Russneft, not to be confused with state-controlled Rosneft, Russia’s main oil producer, is one of the top 10 energy companies in Russia, accounting for around 2.8 per cent of total production.
On Thursday, Vagit Alekperov, the CEO of top private Russian oil producer Lukoil, expressed concern about the growing role of state companies in the energy industry.
For many industry observers, the inquiries against Gutseriyev are reminiscent of the fate of another maverick oil billionaire: Mikhail Khodorkovsky, whose Yukos empire was once Russia’s biggest oil producer.
In a series of tax investigations widely seen as steered by the Kremlin, Yukos was dismantled starting from 2003, and Khodorkovsky is now serving out an eight-year prison sentence in far eastern Siberia for fraud.
While Khodorkovsky was arrested by masked and gun-toting security officers in his private jet on an air strip in Siberia, Gutseriyev has so far managed to escape from Russian police.
After a warrant was issued for his arrest in Russia on Tuesday, Russian newspapers said he had fled to Britain via Azerbaijan, an oil-rich state to the south of Russia whose president Ilham Aliyev is a personal friend.
A spokesman for the British embassy in Moscow said British authorities could not comment on any visa applications. Azerbaijani officials this week denied Gutseriyev was in the country.
In his resignation letter last month, the oil billionaire said he had suffered “unprecedented persecution” at the hands of Russian authorities to force him out of the energy business. “They told me I could take the easy way out. I refused,” Gutseriyev said.
Last week, Gutseriyev’s son Chingiskhan, himself a senior executive in his father’s businesses, was reported dead in what the Kommersant daily described as mysterious circumstances.
Chingiskhan, who attended an elite private school in Britain and was a graduate of Warwick University, was said in several news reports to have died of a brain haemorrhage following an accident in his Ferrari in Moscow.
But Kommersant said Moscow police had no record of a car accident involving Chingiskhan and that there was no sign of him being treated in any Moscow hospital. Russneft officials said the death was a tragic accident.
The fate of Russneft is also a mystery.
Gutseriyev earlier announced the sale of the company to Kremlin-friendly metals tycoon Oleg Deripaska, but the deal appears to have stalled after Russian authorities froze the company’s assets pending an inquiry.
Russneft’s press office did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Gutseriyev, an ethnic-Ingush who comes from the southern Russian province of North Ossetia, is a Russian business veteran who is widely respected in the energy industry.
He trained initially as a chemist, then went on to study energy, finance and law. He set up a bank immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union and has served as a deputy in the Russian parliament, his official biography said.
Gutseriyev was listed as Russia’s 31st richest man in the 2007 edition of Forbes magazine, with a personal fortune estimated at $3.1 billion.—AFP
