Crash lawyer 'in fear of Russian spies'

A millionaire British lawyer who died in a mystery helicopter crash was being targeted by the Russian secret service.

Stephen Curtis, who controlled Russian oil giant Yukos, feared Russia's FSB security agency was trying to quiz him over the £17 billion firm as part of an investigation ordered by President Vladimir Putin.

Mr Curtis, 45, took over Yukos last November when its boss Mikhail Khodorkovsky was arrested on fraud charges and jailed.

When he died, he was reorganising the company to protect shareholders from the Russian investigation. He had set up eight new companies and was shifting operations from Gibraltar to the tax haven of Guernsey, sources say.

Mr Curtis feared official questioning as he alone carried in his head the web of offshore structures he had created to protect Khodorovsky's and Yukos's vast profits, made when the oil industry was suddenly privatised after the collapse of communism.

It is understood Mr Curtis approached Britain's National Criminal Intelligence Service days before his death, offering information in return for protection from the Russian investigation.

He met a handler shortly before he died near his castle home in Portland, Dorset, along with his pilot. As part of a vast Russian probe, Swiss police raided two Yukos companies, Southern Petroleum and Karran Tankers, and froze their assets - coincidentally on 3 March, when Mr Curtis's helicopter crashed. The bodies of Mr Curtis and his pilot Matthew Radford, 34, were badly burned and had to be identified from DNA samples.

In the weeks before his death Mr Curtis spoke of receiving anonymous death threats on the phone and was considering moving from his Park Lane premises for security reasons. He told friends he was being bugged by the Russian authorities.

Boris Berezovsky, the exiled Russian billionaire who fled Putin's purge on those he deemed to have profited unduly from postcommunist Russia, said: "Stephen was prepared every day to die. He loved life."

Mr Berezovsky said he was suspicious of the crash, adding: "I was shocked. I tried for myself to investigate and even now I have a lot of strange coincidentals. I don't like strange coincidentals."

Lawyer Robert Amsterdam, who is representing Yukos shareholders under arrest in Russia, said: "The timing could not have been worse for the company. If someone had planned to do something, this would have been the time that would have been chosen."

In Britain the NCIS is monitoring the Dorset police investigation into the crash.

Mr Curtis was also involved in talks with Chelsea FC owner Roman Abramovich in December over a merger between Yukos and Abramovich's Sibneft oil group which would have made it the fourth largest hydrocarbon firm in the world.

Mr Curtis was obsessively secretive about his life. Born in Sunderland, he studied economics and law at Aberystwyth University.

He was a clerk at Chester Crown Court for a while before joining law firm Fox and Gibbons where he drew up an international client list. He married Sarah, an opera singer, and they had a daughter, Louise. One friend said: "He was a colourful character, a James Bond type figure - he was very keen on James Bond."

Mr Curtis liked rugby and sailing, had a garage full of sports cars and flew everywhere by helicopter or private jet. Each year he took his mother to Monaco to play at the casino and had a black credit card with a £1million limit.

One friend said: "He lived for closing down the big deals."

Officials at the Air Accident Investigation Branch issued a bulletin this month with cursory details of the crash and warned a final ruling on the cause could take months.

The bulletin stated that after requesting permission to land, the pilot reported an unspecified problem and lost control of the helicopter during its final approach. The pilot was in radio contact with the airport's visual controller for the flight's last 29 seconds.

Witnesses heard the helicopter's rotor cut out. It then struck the ground nose-first at high speed, exploding on impact and sending a fireball 10 metres into the air.