Washington Post - 10.15.2003

The Washington Post

Greece Refuses to Extradite Russian Tycoon

By Peter Baker, Washington Post Foreign Service

MOSCOW -- A Greek court refused to extradite business mogul Vladimir Gusinsky on Tuesday, ruling that the fraud charges brought by Russian prosecutors would not constitute a crime under Greek law. 

The decision was the third time in a month that Russian prosecutors have lost an extradition battle in their continuing pursuit of tycoons at odds with the Kremlin. It also made Greece the fourth European country in the last 2 1/2 years to reject a high-profile extradition request by Moscow. 

"I'm very happy that it's over," Gusinsky said in a telephone interview hours after the court hearing. Gusinsky, who holds Russian and Israeli passports, was arrested on a three-year-old extradition request on Aug. 23 after landing at the Athens airport for a visit. He said he planned to leave Greece Tuesday night for Tel Aviv and would soon return to the United States, where he has lived much of the time since fleeing Russia in 2000. 

Gusinsky said his case showed that other countries should revoke extradition treaties with Russia. "Russia is using all international agreements on paper in order to persecute political opponents," he said. "This is obvious to everyone. This is going on very openly and cynically and until the international community realizes that . . . Russia will not stop." 

The Russian prosecutor general's office said in a written statement: "The criminal case against V. Gusinsky has not been closed. His status has not been changed -- he is accused of large-scale fraud." 

Gusinsky, a former theater director, assembled the largest independent media empire in post-Soviet Russia during the 1990s and for a time was an influential political player in Moscow. But he fell out with the Kremlin after backing a rival presidential candidate before Vladimir Putin was elected in 2000. Gusinsky was put under criminal investigation and his companies -- including NTV, then Russia's only major independent television network -- were taken away from him. 

Prosecutors alleged that Gusinsky misrepresented assets to obtain more than $250 million in loans from state-controlled Gazprom, the giant energy monopoly headed by a Putin appointee that eventually seized NTV. 

Earlier, a Spanish court rejected an identical extradition request. Gusinsky has denied the charges. 

Russia lost another major extradition request last year when Denmark refused to send Chechen envoy Akhmed Zakayev to Moscow to faces charges of armed insurrection, murder and kidnapping. Zakayev then flew to Britain, which so far has not ruled on a Russian extradition petition. 

Britain in recent weeks has also blocked Russian attempts to extradite two other political enemies of the Kremlin, business magnate Boris Berezovsky and his associate Yuli Dubov, on fraud charges. Britain's Home Office granted each of them asylum. 

"The Russian prokuratora is not learning from its previous mistakes," said Boris Makarenko, an analyst at the Center for Political Technologies, using the Russian word for the prosecutor's office.