PAUL Tatum met a violent death within sight of his great Moscow dream.

Described as "the quintessential entrepreneur" Mr Tatum (39), an activist in the US Republican Party, was instrumental in the construction of Russia's first western luxury hotel, the Radisson Slavyanskaya.

It was the talk of the town when it opened in 1992. President Clinton stayed there during the Moscow summits. More than a hotel, the Slavyanskaya housed a five star shopping mall, the Moscow International Press Club where leading Russian and foreign politicians held their press conferences, a cinema complex and the Russian headquarters of major international media organisations.

In brighter days Mr Tatum was enthusiasm personified. Back in 1994 he said: "This is entrepreneur's heaven. There's no telling how quickly this country could develop and how much it could look like the United States in a very short period of time."

In that same year things started to go wrong, as they frequently do for western businessmen in Russia, and after years of legal wrangles Mr Tatum's life ended on Sunday evening outside the Kievskaya metro station just a couple of hundred yards from his dream hotel. He was gunned down by a lone killer with a sub machine gun, shot a dozen times in the chest and is understood to have died almost instantly.

Murder is big business in Russia and, all too frequently, big business is murder. Russian bankers bite the dust with a terrifying regularity, but the murder of western entrepreneurs is very rare indeed.

Mr Tatum had, in 1994, attempted to depose the directorship of the joint venture which ran the hotel. The management put guards at the entrance to keep him out but he returned to his office in the building accompanied by a platoon of bodyguards.

Court proceedings were opened in Moscow and Stockholm and Mr Tatum told friends he was confident of success.

The Moscow municipality, which owns the building in its entirety and holds 50 per cent of the stock in the company which ran the business, has announced its intention to sell out but Moscow's International Tender Centre (ITC) which is handling the sale, announced yesterday that no buyers had been found.

Mr Anatoly Romanovsky, ITC's president told the Interfax news agency yesterday that he was dismayed at Mr Tatum's murder. "I have no idea who was interested in such a criminal development of the situation and I'm at a loss to explain the killing," he said.

The Moscow City property committee owned half of the company which administered the hotel, a Russian American joint venture called Americom owned 40 per cent, with Radisson International owning the remaining 10 per cent, Mr Romanovsky said, adding that Mr Tatum was merely a hotel manager.

Mr Tatum, on the other hand, considered himself to be a founding partner in the venture. His death has caused worries among the foreign business community in Moscow that the apparent immunity of westerners from the city's contract killing business has ended.