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• Sunday, December 3, 2006 03:14 PM

  Let's think about Litvinenko's credibility as a dissident

  Personally, I would give Litvinenko's claims about the FSB orchestrating those apartment bombings a LOT more seriously if he had come out with them BEFORE he hooked up with Beresovsky. Beresovsky is like Ken Lay meets Tony Soprano. He paid Litvinenko to write that book and then published it himself.

  That's what bothers me here. Beresovsky has enormous self interest at stake. And does anyone really believe he gives a hoot about Chechnya or Chechens? What charity benefits has he thrown to raise money for the refugees?

  What Putin has been trying to do is get this corrupt oligarchy under control, so that Russian big business will pay their taxes and the government can function and pay its workers and there won't be round after round of corporate homicide exploding on the streets of Moscow like there was back during the Yeltsin/Yukos years.

  Much of the bad press about Putin seems to emanate from this group. And the American press seems to accept it all uncritically.

  Look at this:

  http://www.kommersant.com/page.asp?idr=529&id=698453

  In summer 1998, Alexey Pichugin carried out Leonid Nevzlin’s order and found men through Gorin, Shapiro and Volgograd’s gangster Arkady Goritovsky (killed in 2002) to murder Nefteyugansk Mayor Vladimir Petukhov. The mayor demanded that YUKOS pay taxes to the local budget in full. Former paratrooper Evgeny Reshetnikov and convicted criminal Gennady Tsigelnik agreed to execute the order for $10,000.

  On June 26, 1998, Reshetnikov shot the mayor dead with a machine gun, wounding his security man. Some time later, Tsigelnik and Reshetnikov were hired to assault Vladimir Kolesov, a business manager of Rosprom, investigators say. The manager was severely beaten up as “his career achievements ran against Nevzlin’s interests”.

  In fall 1998 and spring 1999, Reshetnikov and Tsigelnik made two murder attempts on Evgeny Rybin, executive at East petroleum handelgas GmbH. The businessman wanted YUKOS to return $100 million that his company had invested in the development of the Zapodno-Poludennoye and Krapivinskoye oil fields. In the first attempt, the killer missed. Later, the killers threw a bomb and fired on the car where only Rybin’s bodyguards were riding in. The driver died and two security men were injured.

  Now look at the way all of this is being spun by the people around Litvinenko.

  They're try to hint around, using these mythical documents that Litvinenko supposedly brought Nevzlin in Israel, that Putin or the FSB was actually behind the murders and disappearances associated with Yukos.

  Well why would the FSB murder a bureaucrat who was trying to get Yukos to pay their tax bill?

  Any FSB agent who did that would have to have been working for the benefit of Yukos, not Putin. And in 1998 the government was still run by Yeltsin, whose 1996 campaign was largely financed and run by Nevzlin.

  These guys have the cojones, I'll say that.

  That doesn't mean they're behind Litvinenko's murder. But you see here from Nevzlin's statements to the press that they are definitely trying to use Litvinenko's murder to their own advantage to create more suspicion about Putin and the tax evasion charges against Khodorkovsky.

  This is what oil wealth does to people, I guess.

  —Patricia Schwarz
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