A man with enemies in high places

· Tycoon said foes in Tbilisi were plotting to kill him
· Activities also investigated in Russia and Brazil

The death of Badri Patarkatsishvili, a Georgian billionaire businessman who collapsed at his mansion in Surrey, was referred to a serious crimes unit last night amid fears that he may have been murdered.

While police stressed there was no evidence of foul play, the tycoon's recent claims that he was the target of an assassination plot, and some of the details of his long and controversial business career, led police to decide upon a painstaking investigation.

After making millions during the wild days of 1990s privatisation in Russia, he began to dabble in the volatile, and sometimes violent, politics of his native country. Along the way he made friends and enemies, probably in equal measure, of KGB officers, Chechen warlords, political fixers and shadowy tycoons.

He had spent the hours before his death in meetings with his advisers and business associates, including the Russian multimillionaire Boris Berezovsky, the former attorney general Lord Goldsmith and the former Tory PR guru Lord Bell. At the top of the agenda at some of those meetings was discussion about the distinct possibility that the authorities in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, would soon be requesting his extradition, accusing him of plotting a violent coup.

Shortly before Christmas, Patarkatsishvili had claimed that his enemies in Tbilisi were planning to murder him in Britain. He produced what he said was a tape recording of a conversation between an interior ministry official and a Chechen gangster in which a plot was discussed. "We'll be able to deal with him - that's not a problem," said the man identified as a government official. "Even if he has a hundred people guarding him, well that's not a problem. Our issue is such that we'll destroy these guards."

The day after the allegation first surfaced in a British newspaper, it became apparent that the Georgian government already had a secretly made recording of its own, this time a video that appears to show Patarkatsishvili offering an enormous bribe to a government official in return for orchestrating a coup.

The official, who now appears to have been sent to entrap the billionaire, can be heard asking whether they should murder a minister or persuade police to shoot into a crowd of peaceful demonstrators. "Would it be worth a hundred million to you?" the official asks, and Patarkatsishvili replies: "The freedom of the Georgian people is certainly worth a hundred million."

Patarkatsishvili was promptly named as a suspect in an official investigation into a conspiracy to murder and conspiracy to commit a terrorist act and his Georgian bank accounts were frozen. A few days later he withdrew his own bid to run for president in last month's elections, although he later changed his mind again and won 7% of the vote.

In Leatherhead, neighbours said the businessman had recently increased the height of the fencing around his property and installed security cameras and new gates. Residents said he never went anywhere without his security team and would often be shadowed by a second vehicle containing bodyguards.

Although he continued to travel between his homes in London, Surrey and the Israeli Red Sea resort of Eilat, he announced last month that he would not be travelling to Georgia for some time.

He was running out of places where he was welcome, having fled Russia in 2000, around the same time Berezovsky left. He had also fallen out with President Vladimir Putin, and was later charged in his absence with fraud and attempting to organise the escape from prison of another Russian oligarch - an enterprise that saw the arrest of one of his bodyguards, Andrei Lugovoi, the man since named as prime suspect in the polonium-210 poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko.

Patarkatsishvili appears never to have lost his anger that he had been driven from Russia by Putin, a man whom he claimed to have helped into the Kremlin. Last week a Georgian newspaper, Alia, quoted him as saying: "You probably do not know that but it was me who brought Putin into politics. He worked in St Petersburg as mayor Anatoli Sobchak's deputy and provided a 'roof' for my businesses there.

"Then, he had only one dirty greenish coloured suit. When Sobchak lost in elections ... he resigned. Then he was calling me twice a day, begging: 'Badri, take me to Moscow, I do not want to stay here.' Later it was to be decided who should be new prime minister. We realised the premier is the future president - and he became our candidate. So it was us who made him."

Unwanted in Russia and at risk of arrest in Georgia, Patarkatsishvili was also under investigation in Brazil over his interest in the Sao Paulo football team Corinthians, amid suspicion that the club was being used as a vehicle for money laundering. As federal prosecutors moved in 18 months ago, two of the team's top players, Carlos Tevez and Javier Mascherano, were swiftly moved to the east London club West Ham, and Patarkatsishvili was later linked to an attempted takeover of the club.

While there is no evidence that Patarkatsishvili was murdered, the police response indicates that they accept he may have been. If that evidence emerges, there will be no shortage of places where the police could look for suspects.

Possible police leads


Patarkatsishvili had claimed last December that he had been warned that officials inside the Georgian interior ministry had been plotting his murder in Britain. "They are doing everything to stop me from running for president," he said.


Vladimir Putin and Patarkatsishvili were sworn enemies, and he was wanted in Russia to face trial on criminal charges. The murder of Alexander Litvinenko in November 2006, with polonium, suggests that figures within the Russian state are capable of committing murder in Britain.


According to Patarkatsishvili, his Georgian enemies were planning to hire members of a notorious Chechen gang that kidnapped and beheaded three British telecommunications engineers and a New Zealander in 1998.