Stephen Curtis ( born Stephen Curtis ; August 7, 1958 , Sunderland — March 3, 2004 , Bournemouth ) was a British lawyer who participated in the creation of Russian oligarchic business structures in the 1990s .
Biography
Born in the city of Sunderland in the family of an accountant. He graduated from Aberystwyth University. In the 1980s he worked at the law firm Fox and Gibbons . Worked with clients from the Gulf countries.
In the 1990s, he founded his own law firm, Curtis & Co, which specializes in commercial affairs.
Since 1997, he worked with the Menatep Group . Curtis helped organize the structure of offshore companies associated with Yukos.
Hundreds of millions of oil revenues were withdrawn from Russia through offshore accounts in Gibraltar, the Cayman Islands and the Isle of Man.
How important he was to Yukos was revealed from the documents shown by Channel-4. In 1999, for example, he thus organized the structures of Yukos for offshore oil trading that they formally did not belong to the company and could not be taxed by the Russian state [1] .
Curtis acquired a significant fortune that allowed him to buy a penthouse in London, a 19th century castle in Dorset , a private jet and a helicopter.
Curtis represented the interests of Boris Berezovsky and Nikolai Glushkov, the former deputy general director of Aeroflot, at the Supreme Court of Great Britain at the hearings on their suit against the American publishing house Forbes [2] .
When in March 2003, Boris Berezovsky was detained in London at the request of the Russian prosecutor's office, Curtis made a half cash deposit for Berezovsky (the deposit was £ 160,000). The other half of the pledge was made by Lord Timothy Bell [3] .
On November 14, 2003, after the arrest of Platon Lebedev , Curtis became the Managing Director of the Menatep Group [4] .
Curtis feared for his life; in particular, he was threatened with death by telephone.
According to the Times, Curtis was collecting dirt on Putin and 11 more Russians. The goal was to “discredit Putin and his entourage”.
He died in a plane crash on March 3, 2004. His private helicopter Agusta 109 crashed near the airport of Bournemouth near the Channel Channel [5] [6] .
The investigation of helicopter fragments almost did not shed any light on the causes of the disaster, and in November 2005 a large investigative jury concluded that Curtis died as a result of an accident.
Links
Notes
- ↑ British lawyer of the Russian oligarch "was a police informer" // Kommersant. Daily, No. 75p, April 26, 2004. - C. 5.
- ↑ WORLD. The deceased director of the MENATEP group was Berezovsky’s lawyer. // Echo. 2004-03-05. No. 043.
- ↑ Welcome to Londongrad
- ↑ SOS management. For Plato Lebdeva Stephen Curtiss pauses himself // Kommersant Daily, No. 209, November 15, 2003. - C. 1.
- “Life and Death of Stephen Curtis, Oligarch's Lawyer” , BBC, 2 October 2006
- ↑ Arvedlund, Erin E .. Lawyer for Russian Tycoon Dies in Crash (Eng.) , The New York Times (March 4, 2004). The appeal date is March 16, 2018.