Moscow rules

In 2003, Legal Business flew into Moscow on the day the authorities arrested Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then Russia’s richest man, whose Yukos oil company was about to merge with Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich’s Sibneft. The resulting cover feature was called ‘The gamble’ (LB140).

For those leading law firms advising major Russian companies, the rewards can be immense. Bruce Buck, European head of US law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, developed a close relationship with Abramovich, advising Sibneft on various acquisitions. As a result, Buck has found himself thrust into the limelight as chairman of Abramovich’s Chelsea Football Club. Skadden has done rather well financially too, billing the football club alone – a tiny part of the billionaire’s corporate empire – £538,000 in one year, according to the Club’s most recent accounts.

However, the consequences can be dire. In March 2004, Tim Osborne, a partner at Cheltenham and London firm Wiggin Osborne Fullerlove, was appointed to the independent board of directors of Group Menatep (now GML) – the holding company for a strategic stake in Yukos – following the detainment of director Platon Lebedev (see timeline: ‘The rise and fall of an oligarch’, page 48) and the then unexplained death of Lebedev’s successor, Stephen Curtis.

As a former partner at eponymous law firm Curtis & Co, he acted for both Khodorkovsky and the original Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, now exiled in London. Curtis’s role for each of them was to set up complex offshore financial arrangements. His untimely demise in a helicopter crash near Bournemouth Airport in March 2004 resulted in a coroner’s verdict of accidental death, but it has led to prominently reported conspiracy theories of the type fuelled by the poisoning in London of the former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko in November last year.

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