RUSSIA: Russia's crackdown on its billionaire tycoons widened yesterday with the announcement of a full-scale tax investigation into Yukos, the country's fourth- largest oil company, writes Chris Stephen in Moscow.
The news follows the arrest last week of two senior Yukos executives and a two-hour grilling of its boss, Mr Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russia's richest man.
Also targeted is Russia's second-richest man, Mr Roman Abramovich, who hit the headlines earlier this month when he bought English football club Chelsea.
Russia's top accountant, Audit Chamber boss Mr Sergei Stepashin, denounced the Chelsea deal, saying it was paid for with £200 million in unpaid taxes. "That's where the spare money for Chelsea came from," Mr Stepashin was reported as saying in the Russian press.
And earlier this week Aluminium magnate Mr Oleg Deripaska became the latest tycoon to fall into the prosecutor's gunsights as a probe into his acquisition of assets was begun.
Now a major battle is shaping up between the two pillars of power in Russia - the Kremlin and the super-rich tycoons, referred to as the Oligarchs because of their political muscle. These tycoons include men who grew rich by snapping up state assets like oil fields at a fraction of their later worth in the chaotic 1990s.
Now prosecutors say they want to investigate just how these deals were done.
On Friday police armed with machine-guns stormed into the plush Moscow headquarters of Yukos, spending 17 hours sifting company records.
Mr Khodorkovsky yesterday said the investigation was politically motivated. "It has a purely political character," he said.
Others are warning that opening the books on billions of pounds worth of questionable privatisations may undermine investor confidence just as Russia's economy starts to grow.
This is not the first time the Kremlin has taken on the tycoons.
President Putin sent in the investigators in 2000, shortly after winning power. Investigators then targeted dozens of companies, ending with two tycoons, Mr Boris Berezovsky and Mr Vadim Gusinsky, fleeing the country.
The 2000 witch-hunt ended in a deal the Oligarchs thought they had struck with Mr Putin - he would allow them to keep their fortunes and they would stay out of politics.
Why Mr Putin has chosen now to unleash the investigators is a hot topic among the outdoor bars and cafes of sultry Moscow. Some see it as a ploy ahead of December's parliamentary elections - bashing the Oligarchs is popular in a country where poverty remains widespread.
But Mr Khodorkovsky has another explanation, blaming it on in-fighting amid Mr Putin's key advisers. "We are not doing the fighting. We are being fought over," he said. "We are seeing a power struggle between people closest to Putin." And some think this is a punishment because Mr Khodorkovsky, worth at least £5 billion, has begun donating money to two opposition parties.
Analyst Mr James Fenkner of Moscow brokerage Troika Capital says the purge may be a warning to tycoons not to dabble in politics. "It would be quite silly to have an out-and-out Oligarch war right now," he said.
Mr Putin's own economic adviser, Mr Andrei Illarionov, has warned: "If we start now to revisit privatisation it will not be easy to stop this process. It is not inconceivable that such action will lead to a new civil war." This may be an exaggeration, but his anxiety is understandable. Nobody knows how much foul air will be released by any wide-ranging probe into exactly who did what in the wildcat 1990s.