Death of billionaire Georgian leader 'is suspicious'

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article3362061.ece

February 13, 2008
Death of billionaire Georgian leader in London 'is suspicious'
Tony Halpin in Moscow

An exiled Georgian billionaire who claimed less than two months ago that he was the target of an assassination plot has been found dead in London.

Police said that they were treating the death of Badri Patarkatsishvili, 52, as "suspicious". The businessman, who was Georgia's richest man and a close friend of the anti-Kremlin oligarch Boris Berezovsky, died of an apparent heart attack at his £10 million mansion in Leatherhead, Surrey, last night.

"As with all unexpected deaths it is being treated as suspicious. A post-mortem examination will be held later today to establish the cause of death," a Surrey police spokeswoman said.

Mr Patarkatsishvili, worth an estimated £6 billion, funded an opposition campaign against Georgia's pro-western leader Mikheil Saakashvili and stood against him in last month's presidential election. Georgia accused him of plotting a coup after airing a tape of him offering a $100 million bribe to a police chief to support opposition demonstrators.

Mr Patarkatsishvili hired Lord Goldsmith, the former Attorney General, to represent him as Georgian authorities mounted investigations into his business interests in the former Soviet republic.

Mr Berezovsky said that his former business partner had complained about his heart when the pair met earlier on Tuesday, but had not been ill.

Mr Patarkatsishvili lived in Russia between 1993 and 2001. He was wanted by Russian authorities on charges of theft from the country's largest car factory AvtoVAZ in the 1990s, which he ran with Mr Berezovsky.

He was also accused of plotting to arrange the escape from custody in 2001 of Nikolai Glushkov, deputy director of Aeroflot, Russia's national airline, who had been accused of fraud.

The man charged with breaking out Mr Glushkov was Andrei Lugovoy, who was arrested and jailed after the attempt failed. Mr Lugovoy is wanted by the British Crown Prosecution Service for the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, the dissident former Russian spy poisoned in London with radioactive polonium-210 in 2006.

Mr Lugovoy was responsible for protecting Mr Patarkatsishvili and Mr Berezovsky at the time as head of security at the Russian TV channel ORT, which the two men controlled.

Mr Patarkatsishvili remained good friends with Mr Lugovoy, a former KGB officer who is now a member of Russia's Parliament. The pair were seen socialising together in the Georgian capital Tbilisi shortly before Mr Litvinenko was poisoned.

Mr Litvinenko also had links with the Georgian businessman. Sources in Tbilisi have told The Times that he stayed at Mr Patarkatshvili's residence in Georgia en route to Turkey when he fled Russia to seek asylum in London in 2000.

Russian prosecutors claim that Mr Litvinenko also visited Mr Patarkatsishvili as well as Mr Berezovsky in London shortly before he was poisoned. They accuse Mr Berezovsky of involvement in the murder of the former Federal Security Service (FSB) agent as part of a plot to damage President Putin's international image.

Georgia's former Defence Minister, Irakli Okruashvili, accused Mr Saakashvili of encouraging him to kill Mr Patarkatsishvili in 2005, although he later retracted the claim.

The tycoon helped to finance the “Rose Revolution” that swept Mr Saakashvili to power in Georgia in 2003. But the two men later fell out and he accused the president of turning into a dictator.

When Georgian police used tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse opposition street protests in November, special forces troops also stormed the studios of Imedi TV and forced it to shut down. Mr Patarkatsishvili founded the station and News Corporation, which also owns The Times, was managing it at the time of the incident.