It was one of those lunches journalists attend from a sense of duty. The TASS correspondent had, after all, used the word shishka. The literal translation is pine-cone, but in Russian slang it indicates a personage of the highest importance, writes Seamus Martin
A bigwig had arrived from Moscow, and the correspondent wanted me to meet him.
Similar invitations to meet unspecified personalities had, in the distant past, led this writer to sup with a boxing promoter later found guilty of torturing fellow members of the London underworld.
There was also a memorable cracking of lobster claws in the Conrad Hotel in Dublin when a South African academic at dinner turned out to be the head of the Broederbond, the secret society that ran the apartheid regime. On this occasion, the shishka, who had come to town on business, was important enough, I was told, to have attended the inauguration of the President, Mrs McAleese, in Dublin Castle earlier in the day. I presumed, therefore, his business in Dublin was more legitimate than that of other Russians.
We sat down to lunch on inauguration day at one of the best restaurants in Dublin, to the sound of the shishka's mobile phone.
It rang continuously during the meal. His responses were curt, just a da or a nyet as the occasion demanded. Only once did he elaborate further. This was when greeting a caller by name. "Aah, Anatoly Borisovich . . . ," he pronounced with obvious pleasure. The TASS correspondent and I exchanged knowing glances. Anatoly Borisovich Chubais was the architect of Russia's controversial privatisation programme.
Inspired by God, according to a biography edited by himself, Chubais's programme helped massively enrich the powerful class of men known in Russia as the Oligarchs. Many of them now live outside Russia, but the richest of all, Mikhail Khodorkovsky of the Yukos oil company, now resides in the dim confines of Moscow's Matrosskaya Tishina prison.
The shishka of that Dublin lunch was Leonid Nevzlin, Khodorkovsky's closest business associate. He had just been parachuted into TASS with the express purpose of combating the extremely negative image of Russian business which in Ireland and elsewhere was held in low esteem.
Dmitri Yakubovsky had, after all, run a network of political bribery and corruption from a company called Distal registered at a now non-existent address on Dublin's Wellington Quay. He ended up in St Petersburg's Kresty prison.
Far from improving the image of the Oligarchs, Nevzlin has just had a warrant issued for his arrest on charges of ordering a double contract killing and a number of attempted murders.
With personal wealth estimated at $2 billion in the US, Nevzlin had previously been on Interpol's wanted list on charges of fraud and tax evasion. The new accusations alleged for the first time that people connected with the embattled Yukos company were involved in offences other than those of a strictly economic nature.
Nevzlin, who now lives in Israel, has, through his Moscow lawyer, strenuously denied all wrongdoing.
The legal moves against Yukos, which owes billions in unpaid taxes, have been viewed by many western analysts as a personal assault on Khodorkovsky and an attack on genuine business activities by President Vladimir Putin.
Similar actions in the US against companies such as Enron, or exposés of wrongdoings in the banking sector in Ireland, are seen in an entirely different light as efforts to make businesses work in an ethical manner.
Why one rule for Russia and another for the west? Russia is a land where conspiracy theories abound, and some of them appear to have been adopted by western analysts. An early explanation put forward was that Putin was afraid of Khodorkovsky's growing political status and resented his financial contributions to opposition parties. Khodorkovsky, the theory went, could at some stage challenge Putin for the presidency.
This, to anyone who knows Russia, is absolute nonsense. Khodorkovsky's chances of ever being elected president are nil.
First, he and the other oligarchs are despised by the Russian electorate and, second, his Jewish origins are a distinct electoral drawback in a country where anti-Semitism is still a force.
I lived in Moscow in those days when the dominant theory was that the newly-created "robber barons" would in time become legitimate businessmen. Those who posited that theory have, not surprisingly, been reluctant to admit they were wrong and insist that the oligarchs have now become decent law-abiding entrepreneurs, with President Putin as the bad guy out to get them.
On the other hand Mr Putin is, for all his faults and for all the flaws exposed in Russia's recent elections, the elected leader of Russia and its people and rightly feels that he has a far greater right to run the country than have the oligarchs.
If, under his administration,Yukos is broken up and its components sold openly and legitimately then Russia's oil industry could benefit. If the beneficiaries of the break-up are merely the friends of the administration who buy at knockdown prices, then little in the sphere of Russian business will have been reformed and international confidence justifiably undermined.
Seamus Martin is a former Moscow correspondent of The Irish Times