At least 20 armed Russian police officers raided a Moscow bank controlled by the billionaire owner of Britain's Independent and Evening Standard newspapers today.
Tycoon and former KGB spy Alexander Lebedev was in the Moscow offices of his National Reserve Bank when police investigators arrived with an armed guard to seize documents, according to his aide Artyom Artyomov.
Mr Lebedev has ruffled feathers in the Kremlin in recent years by funding an opposition newspaper and standing against government candidates in elections.
"This is known as a mask show in Russia: there are 20 or 30 people in masks and carrying automatic weapons," Mr Artyomov told reporters.
High-profile raids by heavily armed law enforcement agents in masks, known as mask shows, sometimes signal the onset of an attack on the business empires of Russian businessmen who have fallen out of favour with the Kremlin.
Mr Artyomov said Mr Lebedev was still present at the offices just 4 miles from the Kremlin but refused to speculate on what the raid could be linked to.
"They are looking for something, but I have no idea what," he said. "We have absolutely no idea what is going on."
A Moscow police spokeswoman confirmed that agents from law enforcement agencies were at the bank's offices but gave no further details.
A former KGB spy who once worked at the Soviet embassy in London, Mr Lebedev built a fortune by trading securities in the chaos that followed the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.
But Mr Lebedev, who often sports ripped jeans and designer trainers, has raised eyebrows in Moscow over recent years by openly criticising Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
"I don't see politics in this," Mr Artyomov told journalists outside the building. "It's simply Russian idiocy."
Mr Lebedev is worth $2 billion and is the world's 488th richest person, according to the latest global rich list published by Forbes magazine.
Together with former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Mr Lebedev is co-owner of the Russian opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta, where journalist Anna Politkovskaya wrote until her murder in 2006.
Mr Lebedev bought the Evening Standard in 2009 and the Independent this year. His companies also hold significant stakes in Aeroflot and Russia's gas gaint Gazprom.
Agencies