Another "spy affair" wraps up

Around this time last year, the biggest story in Russia (aside from Medvedev’s inauguration) was the shareholder conflict at TNK-BP. The dispute — between British oil giant BP and a group of Russian oligarchs — proved that business in Russia had yet to move beyond the chaos and murkiness of the 1990s, despite official protests to the contrary. It wrought havoc on investors’ views of Russia, just as the country was about to take a deep plunge with the global financial crisis.

The dispute broke out in March 2008, when the FSB (the main successor to the KGB) raided the offices of BP and TNK-BP in Moscow, and also arrested two Russian-American brothers, Ilya Zaslavsky, a TNK-BP employee, and Alexander Zaslavsky, the head of the British Alumni Club here and an independent energy analyst. They were promptly accused of trying to steal state secrets from a Russian citizen employed by a "national hydrocarbon institution," presumably Gazprom.

The buzz surrounding the arrests soon died down, as FSB raids, murky lawsuits against TNK-BP and drawn-out visa problems for the company’s foreign employees made the front pages daily (for a roundup of the dispute, you can read an article I co-wrote on it here). All we knew was that the brothers were not in prison or pre-trial detention, but were barred from leaving Moscow.

Today, more than one year later, Ilya and Alexander Zaslavsky were given a one-year suspended sentence for attempted industrial espionage.

I managed to reach Ilya today, but he declined to comment. No word on whether he and his brother are now allowed to leave Moscow, or how this will affect their careers.

The TNK-BP dispute, meanwhile, died down after a cease-fire was signed last year, but not until after its American CEO fled the company — and the country — along with dozens of other foreign employees.

http://www.globalpost.com/notebook/russia-and-its-neighbors/090507/another-spy-affair-wraps