Russian tycoon's British lawyer 'was a police informant'
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The secretive British lawyer behind the jailed oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky became a police informant only days before he died in a mysterious helicopter accident, it was claimed last night.
The secretive British lawyer behind the jailed oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky became a police informant only days before he died in a mysterious helicopter accident, it was claimed last night.
Stephen Curtis, who helped run the Russian billionaire's huge financial empire, was killed last month when his six-seater Augusta 109 crashed in a field near Bournemouth.
Hundreds of people attended the funeral in Dorset, including Boris Berezovsky, another Russian oligarch and a political opponent of President Valdimir Putin.
New evidence casts doubt on the circumstances of the death. A high-level police inquiry is attempting to establish whether the crash really was an accident.
Mr Curtis was an informant for the National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS) in London, Channel 4 News claimed last night, but had spoken to his handler only twice before he was killed.
Mr Curtis ran Menatep, the company that controls the oil giant Yukos. He was a close confidant of Yukos's former boss, Mr Khodorkovsky, who has fallen foul of President Putin and has been charged with fraud and tax evasion.
Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) officials have said they are keeping an open mind, and that piecing together the wreckage could take months because of the ferocity of the explosion.
Last November, as the key players in Yukos were either jailed or on the run, Mr Curtis became managing director of Menatep. The appointment was meant to put a key executive beyond the grasp of Russian officials.
Mr Curtis, of whom no photograph has been seen until now, was born in Sunderland in 1958 and studied economics and law at Aberystwyth University. He was employed as a clerk at Chester Crown Court before joining international law firm Fox & Gibbons, where he built a network of Arab clients in the Gulf.
At Fox & Gibbons he worked on a strategic oil deal between a Russian oil company and the United Arab Emirates. In 1994, he set up his own Park Lane practice, Curtis & Co, but left in 1998 as he became more involved with Menatep. Mr Khodorkovsky was so impressed with his work that when the oligarch was jailed last October, Mr Curtis was brought out of the shadows to become the boss, controlling $30bn of assets.
In the weeks before the accident, death threats against him increased and he was convincedhe was being bugged by the Russian authorities and business rivals. He said he was planning to sell his London apartment because it had become too well known.
Just how central he was to Yukos is shown by documents seen by Channel 4. In 1999, for example, he drew up the structures for Yukos's offshore oil trading business, giving it control of the companies while disassociating from them in a way that would save it disclosing taxable sales to the Russian authorities.
Since then, Yukos has been hit with a $3.5bn tax bill and has been the target of a concerted attack by President Putin, apparently keen to neutralise an over-mighty oligarch. The company, whose Moscow offices were raided again last week, has been barred from selling or transferring its assets. Mr Khodorkovsky, who denies charges of fraud, is expected to go on trial in Russia in June.