Russia halts probe against London tycoon-report
Source: Reuters
MOSCOW, Jan 22 (Reuters) - Russian prosecutors have halted an investigation into Boris Berezovsky, a billionaire businessman living in exile in London, accused of planning a coup, Itar-Tass news agency reported on Monday. Berezovsky, who fled Russia for Britain after falling foul of the Kremlin under President Vladimir Putin, told journalists last January he had been planning a forced takeover of power in Russia. Russian prosecutors opened a formal investigation and Jack Straw, then Britain's foreign minister, warned Berezovsky that his residency status could be reviewed if he continued to advocate a coup. "The case in relation to my client has been halted," Berezovsky's lawyer Andrei Borovkov told Itar-Tass. "The Prosecutor-General's office has informed us that ... further investigation in the absence of the suspect is impossible," Borovkov said. A spokesman for the Prosecutor-General's office declined to comment on the ITAR-TASS report. Berezovsky helped Putin to power during the last days of former president Boris Yeltsin's rule but later fell foul of the Kremlin and fled Russia in 2000, becoming a vociferous enemy of Putin from his base in London. Berezovsky told Russian radio station Echo Mosvky in January 2006 that he had been planning a "forced takeover of power" and said the action was justified because Putin's rule was unconstitutional. He repeated the claims in an interview with Reuters. But in a letter to the British Foreign Office he explained that he had not meant violence but a "bloodless" change of regime. Berezovsky is the most powerful of a group of Russian opposition exiles living in London which includes Chechen leader Akhmed Zakayev, KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky and, until his death last November, former spy Alexander Litvinenko.
| AlertNet news is provided by |  |
