Lebedev faces ‘Putin’s revenge’ after fight

The 52-year-old backer of British newspapers the Independent and London Evening Standard, whose net worth was put at $1.1 billion (£680m) by Forbes magazine in March, was also yesterday ordered by federal investigators not to leave the country.

Lebedev, who owns a bank and a campaigning Russian newspaper, is rare among the so-called oligarchs in speaking out against the Kremlin and says he is a victim of a crackdown on dissent since Mr Putin returned to the presidency in May.

He faces the same charge of hooliganism motivated by religious, political, racial, ethnic or ideological hatred as three women from the punk band Pussy Riot, who were jailed for two years in August after bursting into a Russian Orthodox church and belting out a profanity-laced anti-Putin protest.

“I know the position of the president,” Lebedev, a former KGB spy, said in an interview on Tuesday in which he denied funding the opposition and said he had upset the Kremlin by campaigning against corruption.

“He thinks it is true that I have been funding [the opposition], so I was violating rule No 1 – if you have money you should not interfere [in politics].”

Prosecutors opened an investigation into Lebedev last year over an incident in which he leapt out of his chair and threw a punch at property developer Sergei Polonsky, himself a one-time billionaire, during a tele-vision talk show.

He denied hitting Mr Polonsky in the face, although Mr Polonsky fell to the floor and looked dazed.

Lebedev’s business interests in Russia include a bank and real estate assets. He owns a stake in state-controlled airline Aeroflot and has a potato farm.

Most rich Russians have avoided criticising the Kremlin since the arrest in 2003 of former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once Russia’s richest man, after he defied Mr Putin by taking an interest in opposition politics. Khodorkovsky’s oil empire was broken up and sold off, and he is still in prison.

But with former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Lebedev co-owns the Novaya Gazeta newspaper, which has for years criticised the Kremlin and exposed corruption in Russia. Four of its journalists were killed between 2001 and 2009.

He says he is a victim of increasingly aggressive tactics to silence critics since Mr Putin returned to the presidency for a six-year term in May, following the biggest protests against him since he was first elected president in 2000.

Lebedev’s lawyer, Genri Reznik, told Ekho Moskvy radio the charges against the media magnate were “absolutely made up”.

“I believe this is revenge for Lebedev’s public activity, for his real counteraction of corruption, for publishing an opposition newspaper, for supporting Navalny … He has many ‘sins’ [in the eyes of the Kremlin],” he said.

Lebedev’s son, Evgeny, who owns the Independent and Evening Standard, said in a statement the charge was “an extraordinarily disproportionate response” to the incident in the TV studio.