Stephen Curtis, a British lawyer and organizer of offshore “laundries” of Yukos, was a police informer. The website Prigovor.ru reminds its readers of what happened on April 25, 2004.
On this day, on April 25, 2004, the British press massively frightened tricksters from the Oil Company Yukos – on the website of the newspaper “The Independent”, with reference to the “Channel 4” of the British TV, emerged a publication under the title “Russian tycoon’s British lawyer “was a police informant”.
“Channel 4” and the British newspaper reported that “the secretive British lawyer, behind the jailed Russian tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky had become a police informant only days before he died in a mysterious helicopter incident”. “Stephen Curtis, who helped run the Russian billionaire’s huge financial empire, was killed in March 2004, when his six-seater Augusta 109 crashed in a field near Bournemouth”.
“A high level police inquiry is attempting to establish whether the crash was really an accident”. “Mr. Curtis was an informant for the National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS) in London, Channel 4 News claimed last night, but had spoken to his handler only twice before he was killed”, said the British newspaper hinting at some telephone threats, and Curtis’s concerns about his safety and his life.
“Just how central he was to Yukos is shown by documents seen by Channel 4. In 1999, for example, he drew up the structures of Yukos’s offshore oil trading business, giving it control of the companies while disassociating from them in a way that would save it disclosing taxable sales to the Russian Authorities”.
(See also the article “On this day, Stephen Curtis came out of the offshore shadow”).
However, a usual for the British information tradition “search for the hand of Moscow” in this tragedy, soon changed its focus and paid attention to completely other “beneficiaries” in the persons of the “major shareholders” of Yukos. The British press was perplexed by the fact that Stephen Curtis had been a contact person of the British special services. That meant that the whole block of rather valuable information about shady activities of Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s oil empire had turned out to be in the British dossier of the Russian robber-barons on the hook of the British.
Already in May 2004, Thomas Catan, a journalist of the British newspaper “The Financial times”, summing up a one and a half months’ process of collecting information on Curtis, published a journalistic investigation entitled “Before the crash”.
According to this publication, for such clients as Yukos, Stephen Curtis had opened a startling by its size network of shell companies in all offshore zones of the world “to hide money from the eyes of Tax Services”.
A PRIVATE INTELLIGENCE OF STEPHEN CURTIS
Parallel to economic affairs, Russian oligarchs played also in spy games. It was found out that fugitive Russian oligarchs had been clients of a network of private intelligence firms, acted under the general title “ISC Global UK Ltd”.
This network was founded in 2000 by the lawyer Stephen Curtis who represented interests of a group of Russian billionaire-oligarchs, including Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Leonid Nevzlin.
“From December 2001 to June 2004, “Prinstown Investments”, an offshore company under control of Russian oligarchs, paid to ISC for specific services 3.7 British pounds. Another client of ICS was Boris Berezovsky” wrote “The Times” in 2006, when another scandal was erupted around this firm. Referring to the dossier, the newspaper “The Times” in the article entitles “British lawyers hatched Putin smears” pointed out that ISC, at the behest of oligarchs, had been preparing a collusion against the Kremlin, and for that purpose a collection of compromising materials was ordered. The target was 11 senior Russians – from the defense minister to the billionaire Roman Abramovich”.
“The oligarchs, in particular, Leonid Nevzlin, very actively refused to have anything to do with this story, assuring that they had simply received in this firm “consultations on security”, nothing more. But even then few believed in “the fairy tales of “Bloody Lyonya Nevzlin” about “usual consultations on information security”. And nowadays, in the light of current events, according to the actions of the criminal Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the serial murderer Leonid Nevzlin, their dirty games on the brink of betrayal, have predictably turned into ordinary betrayal. An Ordinary collaborationism”, notes the website Prigovor.ru.
(See also the previous article “On this day, the director of the company “Group Menatep Limited” was in false shock”. Criminal articles of Tim Osborne, the director of “Group Menatep Limited”, member of the Lawyers Society and senior partner of “Wiggin Osborne Fullerlove”. The website Prigovor.ru reminds its readers of what happened on April 24, 2007).
