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WASHINGTON — The U.S. State Department refused to comment on Russia's request to hand over Russian businessman Leonid Nevzlin, currently on international wanted list. State Department spokesman Tom Casey said the department has never commented on extradition requests, adding that there is no bilateral agreement on extradition between the United States and Russia. Casey said he had no information on whether Nevzlin is still in the United States. On Tuesday, Russia asked the United States to hand over the former top Yukos manager, who has reportedly been in the Unites States for a week. On Wednesday, Nevzlin asked the U.S....

MOSCOW — When the U.S. law-enforcement agencies repeatedly attempted to imprison Chicago businessman and celebrity Al Capone for bootlegging, racketeering and murder, the charges never stuck. Exasperated with the U.S. government’s attempts to brandish him a crook, Capone decided it was time to fight back. He got himself a media-relations manager and set up a soup kitchen in Chicago. Soon enough he was a news celebrity. Newspaper hacks could not get enough of his lifestyle, his women and his one-liners. But nothing he said during his days ruling streets of Chicago compares to the incredulous cry he let out when...

KIEV — Fugitive Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky admits it is possible he will take part in tenders to privatize Ukrainian enterprises. "I do not rule out the possibility of my partaking in any of the auctions, because Ukraine's new authorities have declared the transparency of the auctions and business as a whole," Berezovsky was quoted by the Ukrainskaya Pravda internet newspaper on Tuesday. He supposed that Ukraine will let "a great number of enterprises" be privatized. Although Berezovsky did not elaborate on what enterprises he was seeking to acquire, while commenting on the sectors of his interest, he said,...

Viktor Yushchenko, Ukraine's pro-western president, appointed one of Russia's leading liberal opposition figures as an adviser yesterday - a move likely to ruffle Kremlin feathers. Boris Nemtsov, a leader of the Union of Right Forces, has been a staunch supporter of Mr Yushchenko and appeared with him during last year's Orange Revolution protests in Kiev. Note, the Union of Right Forces is not right wing, is actually the Oligarches' main party and allied itself in the last Russian elections with the Communists and the Socialists. One of its top people is Chubais who was the representative of the Oligarches in...

MOSCOW (AP)--Boris Berezovsky, the controversial Russian tycoon now living in exile in London, says he wants to move to Ukraine, a Russian news Web site reported Friday. The report came less than a week after the inauguration of Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, who aims to steer the country out of the Kremlin's sphere of influence and toward greater integration with Western Europe. Berezovsky amassed a fortune in dubious privatization deals in the early 1990s and became an influential Kremlin insider, but fell out of favor with President Vladimir Putin and fled the country to avoid an investigation into the laundering...

It is difficult not to feel sympathy for a man confined to Russia's grim prison system, yet the letter by Mikhail Khodorkovsky printed by Vedomosit and The Moscow Times in December as neither a plea for leniency nor an acknowledgement of past errors. Instead, Khodorkovsky's letter constitutes a broad-brush condemnation of the political direction of Russia, by implication justifying the disastrous abuses of and by the Russian state during the late Yeltsin years when Khodorkovsky and his ilk held absolute power. Memories can be short, and a reply is called for. Khodorkovsky rails against the rapacious bureaucracy, predicting that the...

The Iron Lady MOSCOW, December 8 (Itar-Tass) - The Chief Military Procurator’s Office of Russia addressed to the Interpol HQ in Lyons on Wednesday some additional evidence on the case of former head of the “United Energy Systems of Ukraine” industrial and financial corporation Yulia Timoshenko, who was declared internationally wanted on charges of bribing some officials of the Russian Defence Ministry. Chief Military Procurator of the Russian Federation Alexander Savenkov stated here on the same day that “an inquiry came from the Interpol HQ today on the criminal case, in which Timoshenko figures as a defendant. “We have...

Did Ukraine's presidential runoff fail last Sunday? Yes. Do a lot of Ukrainians feel betrayed? Yes. Has democracy in Ukraine been put to the test and failed. Most probably yes. However, almost no one in Western media has considered the unspoken political confrontation in play in Ukraine. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have discovered political activism, while a small number of oligarch clans maneuver to continue their grip over Ukraine's economy and politics. 'It's the economy, stupid' and not democracy that is at the center of Ukraine's present turmoil. Western media and politicians want the world to know they know...

MOSCOW - The legal onslaught on oil company YUKOS should serve as a lesson to other Russian firms to start paying taxes properly, the country's financial markets watchdog said on Thursday. YUKOS, Russia's largest oil producer, failed last month to pay $3.4 billion in back taxes for 2000 and warned investors on Thursday it could be driven into bankruptcy within a month. "It's a good lesson. You have to be careful with taxes," said Oleg Vyugin, head of the Federal Financial Markets Service, Russia's version of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. "It has to be understood that sooner or...

MOSCOW - Mikhail Khodorkovsky has all the time in the world to practice his limbo technique. Remember the limbo? that exotic competition on the nightclub floor when Caribbean dancers would try to outdo each other as they swayed under the limbo bar to choruses of “Limbo! Limbo! How lowww can you gohhhh!” This week, Khodorkovsky and the finest public relations machine his money can buy demonstrated that, if you sway too low beneath the limbo, you fall -- and become a laughingstock. Headed by Khodorkovsky’s PR director and spokesman, Hugo Erikssen, the PR machine is facing credible charges that it...

MOSCOW - The Moscow Times published an editorial Friday editorial, which could only have been written by Judas Iscariot. The editorial is a wholesale denunciation of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, demonizing the man as he faces a likely prison sentence if the charges brought against him by Russian prosecutors are proven to be true. Talk about hitting a man when he is down. The editorial comes in the wake of a decade-long relationship between Khodorkovsky's Menatep and Yukos companies and Moscow Times. Moscow Times is published by a former Dutch communist Derk Sauer who came to Russia as a reporter back in...

MOSCOW - A deal to obtain the release of Mikhail Khodorkovsky in exchange for a YUKOS stake currently belonging to the main shareholders is impossible. As Rosbalt reports, this was announced today by Deputy Speaker of the State Duma Oleg Morozov. 'This proposal is not serious,' he said. 'It is just the emotional reaction of Nevzlin and Dubov to the situation they now find themselves in.' In Mr Morozov's opinion 'the YUKOS shareholders are simply trying to ascertain whether or not we can be bribed over the Khodorkovsky affair.'

The Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, or RSPP, commonly known as "the oligarchs' union," has announced that it wants to merge with two associations devoted to small and medium-sized businesses. "The ideology of the business community must be built on the understanding that Russian business is a united, national force," Vladimir Potanin, owner of the Interros holding and an RSPP board member, wrote in a letter to the union's president Arkady Volsky, suggesting a merger. The RSPP quoted Volsky as supporting a merger with Opora Russia, which represents small and medium-sized firms, and Business Russia (Delovaya Rossia), which pools...

MOSCOW - Today an anti-Putin coalition “Committee-2008” creation is expected to be announced. This organization, created and promoted for the most part by Union of Right Forces (SPS) party, sets an objective of making a “civil” citizen the next president of Russia, not Vladimir Putin “heir”, as one of its founders, Boris Nemtsov, SPS party leader, explained. The president of the new coalition is Garry Kasparov, a famous chess-player. Many well-known journalists are among its members, like Eugeny Kiselev and Viktor Shenderovich. The minimum objective of the “Committee-2008” is ‘survival of democrats and politicians’ as one of the members formulated,...

News of the October arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky was greeted with shock and horror in Washington, which had come to regard the Yukos billionaire as its most influential agent in Moscow -- a position previously held by Anatoly Chubais, the man chiefly responsible for Khodorkovsky's vast wealth. The United States, like Saudi Arabia, its counterpart on the other side of the global oil equation, was quick to realize that Russia's months-long legal onslaught against its biggest oil company and most powerful pro-Western sympathizer had reached the point of no return. It became clear that President Vladimir Putin was determined to...

MOSCOW - Two ex-bankers on Wednesday, Nov. 26, filed a criminal complaint with the Swiss attorney general against Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Platon Lebedev, and Alexei Golubovich, accusing them of money laundering and support for a criminal organization. The Russia Journal has obtained a copy of the complaint. The Journal asked Yukos press office to comment on the charge but no comments were received. The former bankers have requested the federal officials in Switzerland to open an investigation into the charges and to search the records of the Swiss offices of Menatep SA, Menatep Finances SA and Valmet (in liquidation) and of...

Self-exiled oligarch, former media mogul and sometime jailbird Vladimir Gusinsky may have faded from the headlines since Media-MOST was wrested from his grip. But, to his most-probable dismay, he has not dropped out of the Kremlin's gunsights or, it seems, those of the Greek police. For the third time, Gusinsky is in custody and may, finally, be extradited to Russia to face charges of fraud. During the whole brouhaha over the Gazprom-leveraged seizing of Media-MOST by the state, a lot of rhetoric was seen in the Western and domestic liberal press about the dark "totalitarian" era supposedly being built by...

LONDON -- Boris Berezovsky, who orchestrated the unification of business moguls behind President Boris Yeltsin to ensure his re-election in 1996, is calling on them to join forces once again -- this time in opposition to President Vladimir Putin -- or risk consequences fatal for their business. Berezovsky said last week's arrest of key Yukos shareholder Platon Lebedev on charges of theft of state property in 1994 was a clear sign Putin was reneging on the pact he made with the oligarchs shortly after he came to power not to re-examine the murky privatization deals of the past. "The main...

An associate of Boris Berezovsky and co-chairman of one of Liberal Russia's quarreling factions was detained Thursday in the murder of Sergei Yushenkov, a co-chairman of the party's other wing. In announcing the arrest of Mikhail Kodanev, Interior Minister Boris Gryzlov gave no details. Russian news agencies, however, citing unnamed sources close to the investigation, said Kodanev is suspected of ordering the hit. A second man, Alexander Vinnik, was taken into custody with him. The arrests of two other men accused of carrying out the killing were announced Wednesday. Kodanev's supporters denied he was involved in the killing of Yushenkov,...