At least 20 armed Russian police officers have raided a Moscow bank controlled by the billionaire owner of Britain's Independent and Evening Standard newspapers.
Tycoon and former KGB spy Alexander Lebedev was in the Moscow offices of his National Reserve Bank when police investigators arrived with an armed guard to seize documents, Mr Lebedev’s aide Artyom Artyomov said.
Mr Lebedev has ruffled feathers in the Kremlin in recent years by funding an opposition newspaper and standing against government candidates in elections, but his spokesman said he did not believe politics was behind the raid.
‘This is known as a mask show in Russia: there are 20 or 30 people in masks and carrying automatic weapons,’ he told Reuters by telephone.
A Reuters photographer said two masked men holding semi-automatic weapons could be seen standing by the building.
High-profile raids by heavily-armed law enforcement agents in masks - known as mask shows - sometimes signal the onset of an attack on the business empires of Russian businessmen who have fallen out of favour with the Kremlin.
Mr Artyomov said Mr Lebedev was still present at the offices, just 7km from the Kremlin, but refused to speculate on what the raid could be linked to.
A Moscow police spokeswoman confirmed that agents from law enforcement agencies were at the bank's offices but gave no further details.
A former KGB spy who once worked at the Soviet embassy in London, Mr Lebedev built a fortune by trading securities in the chaos that followed the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.
But Mr Lebedev, who often sports ripped jeans and designer trainers, has raised eyebrows in Moscow over recent years by openly criticising Russia's paramount leader, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
