TNK-BP worker held on spying charge

Russian security services have detained an employee of BP's Russian venture TNK-BP and a second person with links to the British Council on charges of industrial espionage, according to local media reports.

The agencies quoted the Federal Security Service (FSB) as saying the two people detained were brothers with the family name Zaslavsky, who each hold Russian and US passports.

"According to information of the FSB, the people mentioned were illegally collecting classified commercial information for a number of foreign oil and gas companies to gain advantages over Russian competitors," Interfax quoted an FSB statement as saying.

TNK-BP declined to comment. The British Council said it was not yet aware of the development.

A spokesman for the British embassy in Moscow said: "We are aware of the events. We are monitoring the situation closely and we are in touch with BP."

Meanwhile, unease spread among investors today after security officers and police raided TNK-BP, BP's joint oil venture with local oligarchs and one of Russia's biggest foreign-backed companies.

The raid by FSB agents and the Interior Ministry, recalled similar actions against the Yukos oil company in 2003, the start of a campaign which led to its destruction.

Confidence is low in Russia's ability to protect foreign investors in the oil and gas sector following high-pressure official campaigns in the past years which have forced Shell and BP to sell key assets to Kremlin-controlled players.

Two vanloads of armed agents entered TNK-BP's offices without warning, questioned managers and removed documents and computer servers. A nearby office of BP was also raided later.

Managers told foreign BP employees not to come in to work today because further visits from the security services and police were expected.

"I am at home today. My computer is in (the office) and I would like to get it so I can work from home," one BP source told Reuters.

Some TNK-BP employees were sitting in a cafe near the company's central Moscow headquarters at lunchtime today awaiting word on when they could resume work.

"It's the same situation today as yesterday," one told the news agency. "Our computer network is down and we don't know when we can go back."

The Interior Ministry gave conflicting statements about the reasons for the searches, while TNK-BP would not speak.

A Kremlin spokesman declined comment on the action against TNK-BP, saying it was a police matter. "We should not politicise the work of law enforcement bodies," he added.

But most Russian newspapers saw a political motive in the raid on the company, half of which is controlled by a group of Russian oligarchs who have resisted for some time official pressure to sell their lucrative stakes to the Kremlin.

"The hardliners have come for the Russian half of TNK-BP," Vremya Novostei daily said.

"It looks like an attempt to start the process of passing the asset to one of the state holding companies before the presidential inauguration of Dmitry Medvedev."

Medvedev, formerly a first deputy prime minister and the chairman of state gas giant Gazprom, is due to take over from President Vladimir Putin in May.

Local brokerage Renaissance Capital also saw political pressure behind the security services' move.

"Taking into account a possible sale by Russian shareholders of their stake in TNK-BP to Gazprom, we think increased government scrutiny could be interpreted by the market as TNK-BP being exposed to additional pressure in order to accelerate the deal," analyst Evgenia Dyshlyuk told Reuters.

UK companies are particularly vulnerable to political pressure because of current very poor relations between London and Moscow.

A row over Russia's refusal to extradite an ex-KGB agent suspected of murdering a vocal Kremlin critic in London has led to diplomats being expelled from both countries and British Council offices in Russia being shut down.

TNK-BP managers had long feared Kremlin pressure on the company due to widespread market rumours the Russian oligarch co-owners rejected initial government offers to sell out.

The oligarchs, including Viktor Vekselberg, Mikhail Friedman and Len Blavatnik, issued a rare joint statement on 6 February saying they did not want to sell.

Not everyone was convinced that pressure on the Russian partners to sell was the only possible motive for the raids.

Some analysts noted that TNK-BP had already faced tax claims from the authorities before over its purchase in 2003 of oil assets from Sidanco, a former mid-sized Russian oil company, as part of the work to form the joint venture.

Others speculated that differences between BP and its Russian partners might lie behind the latest difficulties.