Russia's RICHEST MAN Arrested for Theft and Fraud

Russia's richest man, billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky , head of the Yukos oil corporation, was arrested and later charged with forgery and fraud amounting to more than a billion dollars.

Officials said last night Mikhail Khodorkovsky was charged with large-scale fraud, personal and corporate tax evasion, 'persistent disobedience over a court decision, inflicting damage on property owners through deceit, repeated forgery of official documents, and embezzlement'.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky belongs to the Russian elites of very rich "business ‘oligarchs".

Almost all the oligarchs, including Khodorkovsky, are Jewish.

Other Russian Jewish "oligarchs" include;

• Platon Lebedev, a banker, and friend of Khodorkovsky and major shareholder in Yukos, who is now in prison;
  
• Roman Abramovich, who controls the Sibneft oil group and Chelsea Football Club. Abramovich may be the most powerful man in Russia today. Born of Ukrainian Jewish parentage in Saratov, Abramovich was raised in the remote oil town of Ukhta in western Siberia.
  
• Lev Chernoy, a Jewish aluminum mogul, and is a major shareholder in Russian Aluminium;
  
• Oleg Deripaska, controls companies such as Basic Element, Russian Aluminium, Ruspromavto
  
• Alexander Smolensky (Victor Korotayev) . His media interests comprise the business newspaper Kommersant Daily, shares in ORT television station, and the Novaya Gazeta newspaper.

Others include Vladimir Goussinsky, once headed the Russian Jewish Congress, who had. until the end of 1990s, owned a set of influential newspapers and radio stations, including the national TV channel, NTV.

Goussinsky's main media rivals was Boris Berezovsky, also Jewish, who had owned a number of influential newspapers, including controlling the state-owned national TV channel ORT. Berezovsky renounced his Israeli citizenship - which he had acquired in the early 1990s, and was baptized as a Christian. Moscow's chief rabbi, Pinchas Goldschmidt, called him "a double traitor of the Jewish people."

But to many ordinary Russians, Boris Berezovsky is the archetype of the opportunistic Jew who schemes behind the scenes with unclear but destructive goals.

The two media barons were the first Russian Jewish oligarchs to be driven out of Russia and have their assets seized, within months of Putin's election.

Other powerful Russian Jewish entities include:

Anatoly Chubais, Jewish on his mother's side.

Viktor Chernomyrdin, he was named Prime Minister to replace Yegor Gaidar. "Cherno" means "Schwartz" in Yiddish.

Yevgeny Primakov, was named Russian Prime Minister in September, 1998. His family name actually is Finkelstein, and his Jewish parents called him "Pinchas" -- Pinchas Finkelstein.

Almost everybody in Russia thinks the oligarchs are crooks. Many Russians dislike the country's billionaires, or oligarchs, who got rich from buying up state resources at curiously low prices.

Prominent non-Jewish oligarchs include Vladimir Vinogradov and Vladimr Potanin.

Read HERE "The Russian Oligarchs of the 1990's" by Thayer Watkins

Read HERE " Moscow Targets Another Russian Jewish Oligarch "

Read HERE "The Russian Oligarchs... how did they make their money?"

Read HERE "Russian Oligarchs Under Attack"

Read HERE from Collection of Articles from Stanford University's Information Service. Excerpts from Cameron Sawyer's essay " Russia and the Jews":

"As to Jewishness and Bolshevism it is true that the Old Bolsheviks were disproportionately Jewish, and this added to the divisiveness of the revolution. The resistance to Bolshevism by the Whites had religious overtones for many of the participants.

But after Lenin s death the regime itself took a decidedly anti-Semitic turn (and Stalin pretty much killed off the Old Bolsheviks) which survived through the end of the Gorbachev period.

The story is significant in any case, because Russia still has the second biggest Jewish community in the world, second only to that of the United States.

Nowadays Jews are immeasurably better off than they were under Communism, and in fact there is a stream of immigrants returning from Israel back to Russia.

Most of the so-called oligarchs (the really big capitalists created during the 90s) are Jews. "

Ed Koch (Edward Irving Koch), of Polish Jewish immigrants, served three terms as New York's mayor, from 1978 to 1989, had written to Russian President, Vladimir Putin questioning Russian authorities' attack on the Jewish oligarchs

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