RUSSIA: Russian prosecutors tightened the noose around billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky yesterday, targeting one of his prominent allies as a key presidential aide became the next likely victim of a fierce struggle for power in the Kremlin.
The prosecutor general asked a court to strip legal immunity from a key shareholder in Yukos, Mr Khodorkovsky's oil company, sending shares in the firm sliding amid massive market agitation at a feared power-grab by Kremlin hardliners.
Moscow's business and political elite also reverberated with rumours that Alexander Voloshin, the hugely influential head of the Kremlin administration, had resigned in protest at the heavy-handedness of Mr Khodorkovsky's arrest.
Special agents seized Russia's richest man at gunpoint on his private jet on Saturday, and flew him back from Siberia to Moscow to face charges of fraud and tax evasion amounting to more than $1 billion.
Mr Khodorkovsky, unlike other "oligarchs", has riled the Kremlin by funding liberal opposition parties and suggesting he may run for president in 2008.
Mr Voloshin (47) has guided Mr Putin through his first term in office, arbitrating between powerful business and political factions. His departure, ahead of December's parliamentary election and a presidential vote due next March, would suggest Mr Putin had found new confidence, new allies or a new political path.
Mr Voloshin's resignation would also see the Kremlin purged of the men who Mr Putin inherited in 2000 from Boris Yeltsin, and seal the ascendancy of a coterie of security service veterans that followed the ex-KGB agent into the halls of power.
The Kremlin press service declined to comment on widespread media reports that Mr Voloshin had submitted his resignation, and that the announcement was being delayed until the furore over Mr Khodorkovsky's arrest had died down.
"This is a sign of a political turnaround and a strengthening of the position of the special services," said Boris Nemtsov, leader of the liberal Union of Right-Wing Forces party, which is partly financed by Mr Khodorkovsky. "It will have negative consequences for all."
Russia's main stock market closed 3.7 per cent down and Yukos fell 2.5 per cent after prosecutors asked a court to annul Mr Shakhanovsky's election to the upper house of parliament. That would strip the president of Yukos-Moscow, who is accused of tax evasion, of immunity from prosecution.