The arrest this week of two British-educated men on spying charges in Moscow the day before the Duma enacted tough new foreign investment rules was less a Cold War-style incident than a Kremlin power game around who controls oil giant TNK-BP, news agency AFP cites analysts saying.
The Business Week recalls that this isn't the first time TNK-BP has found itself subject to the FSB's attentions. In 2005, the work of several TNK-BP Siberian subsidiaries was suspended on the orders of the FSB, and in 2006 the FSB opened a criminal investigation into allegations that government officials had leaked "state secrets" to TNK-BP. Under Russian laws, exact data about Russia's oil and gas reserves are state secrets.
AIA already reported that on March 19 plainclothes agents, presumably operatives of Russia's Federal Security Service, the FSB, raided the Moscow offices of both TNK-BP and British Petroleum, seizing documents and detaining two managers for questioning. Formal charges were issued the next day. The FSB said that two Russian-American brothers had been charged with industrial espionage just a day after the raids.
The Federal Security Service particularly marked that "business cards of representatives of the CIA and foreign defence departments" were found in the raid.
The subsequent news that two US citizens linked to the British Council have been charged with spying strongly suggests that the FSB's actual beef is with foreigners, and not their local partners, Business Week comments. Despite the spy allegations, analysts say the key to the matter is control over Russia's third-largest oil company. The Russian state wants it to be put in Russian hands with Gazprom again the likely winner, analysts say.
According to official version of Russia's Interior Ministry, the raids were linked to an investigation into Sidanco, a former Russian oil company that ceased to exist when it was merged into TNK-BP in 2003. However, other branches of the same Ministry flatly deny that any investigation into TNK-BP's relationship with Sidanco is under way and the arrest of the Zaslavsky brothers has no obvious connection to the Sidanco case.
The Business Week considers that this raises too credible possibility that Russia's Interior Ministry, the branch of the government responsible for the tax probe, hasn't the faintest idea what the FSB is up to. The weekly underlines that the behavior of Russia's security agencies often seems to border on paranoia. The FSB's Director, Nikolai Patrushev, has frequently warned that foreigners, engaged in NGOs, are in fact out to undermine Russia and steal its secrets. The magazine suggests that one of explanations of the timing of the case may mean that hard-line factions linked to the FSB want to provoke an embarrassing international scandal at the outset of Dmitry Medvedev's presidency. Rightly or wrongly, very few in the oil industry here believe the case of the Zaslavsky brothers is a straight-forward one of industrial espionage, BBC points out.
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