Why Roman wanted Chelsea

Earlier this year, he negotiated the biggest deal of his life. He agreed a merger of his oil company, Sibneft, with Yukos, Russia's largest oil concern. The arrangement created a £22 billion conglomerate and the promise of huge earnings for Abramovich and his new partner, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the dapper, 40-year-old main shareholder in Yukos who pips Abramovich to the distinction of being Russia's richest man.

What happened next was to send a seismic jolt through Moscow's business elite and leave Abramovich thinking very hard about his future. On 21 June police raided the Yukos office, seizing files and computer records. A week later they charged Khodorkovsky's close friend and business partner, Platon Lebedev, with fraud. A few days after that, Khodorkovskywas called to police headquarters-for questioning. He was released, but Lebedev is still in jail awaiting the conclusion of an investigation into allegations of embezzlement and murder.

In the gilded, chandelier-festooned dining rooms of Moscow's grand hotels, where the new capitalist barons lunch, in the boardrooms of the multinationals, and even in the boutiques on the Arbat, conversation was dominated by one question: is the truce over?

It is no secret in Moscow that President Vladimir Putin had an unwritten deal with the oligarchs, the men who came out of the freewheeling, bandit-capitalism of the early Nineties with many of Russia's most valuable assets wrapped up in impenetrable share portfolios. Abramovich used a $200 million dollar stake to buy an oil company later valued at $2 billion. His assets include a halfshare in Russia's biggest aluminium firm, worth an estimated £1.8 billion. He has investments in dozens of businesses from an ice hockey team to a pig farm.

Abramovich, Khodorkovsky and others were reassured by a pledge from President Putin that despite a post-Yeltsin clamour for probes into how they made their fortunes, they would be safe. That promise has held - until now. Lebedev's imprisonment and the feeling of Khodorkovsky's expensively-tailored collar has created an atmosphere of unease and a sense that all bets are off. Who, it was asked, will be next?

The jittery atmosphere of the past few weeks has wiped billions off Russian stock values. The biggest fear of the oligarchs is that Putin will yield to building pressure to investigate the manner in which they acquired their wealth. The Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, set up to represent the interests of men like Khodorkovsky and Abramovich, lobbied parliament to approve a law protecting business tycoons, but so far the approach has been rebuffed.

The Russian president is a former KGB colonel who has surrounded himself with trusted friends and colleagues from the secret services. Like him, many come from St Petersburg, where Moscow's smash-and-grab privatisations of the early Nineties were viewed with revulsion and, it is said, not a little envy.

The popular television channel TVTs recently demanded an inquiry into the privatisations after a poll of 10,000 viewers found that 90 per cent of them wanted one. If it happens, Abramovich can expect no mercy from men like Sergei Stepashin, the steely-eyed former KGB general who runs the government's Audit Chamber. Stepashin has already queried the oil tycoon's tax avoidance measures. The speaker of parliament, Gennadi Seleznev, has asked the prosecutor's office to investigate "the phenomenon" of Russia's billionaires.

What could such scrutiny expect to reveal about the new owner of Chelsea football club?

Picture a scene of bleak misery, a Soviet-era apartment block where the residents are too poor to maintain their own boiler room; too dispirited to wash the stink of urine from the concrete staircase. This is 22 Oktyabrskaya Street in Ukhta, Komi province, in the Arctic Circle, 1,000 miles from Moscow, the place where Abramovich grew up. He was brought here at the age of four to live with his mother's family after his parents died. Neighbours remember him as a slight, quiet child who would often be alone. When the other boys played football in the yard, Abramovich would never join in.

"I remember Roman as a schoolboy," Ekaterina Panteleimonovna, a 74-year-old grandmother from Oktyabrskaya Street said. "He was quite an ordinary lad, Jewish and well behaved. He was not noisy and unpredictable like the other boys of his age."

He started his business career making plastic ducks in a one-room apartment, then he had a second-hand tyre business, but it was only when he began trading in oil that he started to make serious money, enough to raise $200 million to buy into the privatised oil industry. Unlike many of Russia's new, brash " biznizmen", Abramovich remained in the shadows and never drew attention to himself. He was virtually unknown until 1997, when Alexander Korzhanov, Boris Yeltsin's security chief and close friend, revealed his role behind the scenes at the Kremlin.

Korzhanov wrote a book after he fell out with his old boss and was sacked. The book revealed details of what came to be known as The Family - the circle around Yeltsin and his daughters, especially the highly ambitious Tatyana.

It was said that Abramovich fed Tatyana huge sums of money and bought her a villa in Bavaria and two yachts. "He used to go there regularly, every month, with his briefcase," Korzhanov said.

When the Moscow prosecutor's list bearing Abramovich's name was sent to the government, in 1999, the Yeltsin family still held sway and Abramovich could be confident he would not become the victim of a politically-inspired investigation into how he acquired his wealth.

Then, when Putin came to power, he gained another buffer against persecution - he became first an MP and then governor of Chukotka, a desolate, frozen province in Russia's far northeast. He poured money into Chukotka, building homes, hotels and new businesses. One report said he spent nearly £200 million on improving the lot of the province's 73,000 inhabitants.

As governor, he automatically became a member of parliament's upper chamber, a role that carried with it immunity from prosecution. Last year the rules were changed and governors are no longer automatically elected to the upper house. This could compromise Abramovich's immunity, but it would probably take a test case to clarify the law and so far there hasn't been one. In any case, he has said he is stepping down as governor and will not contest the elections in December next year.

So if the anti-oligarch agenda does take off, as some believe it may, what will Abramovich do? He has repeatedly denied that he intends to leave Russia, but the evidence suggests he is not going to sit around and wait for President Putin's ex-KGB cronies to move against him.

He has already taken steps to put his riches beyond their reach. At the end of last year he took more than £600 million out of his Sibneft oil company and is believed to be planning to liquidate most of his stake. One report said he was trying to sell his 50 per cent holding in Russian Aluminium for £1.8 billion. His deal with Yukos's Khodorkovsky could bring him a further £1 billion. Khodorkovsky himself is understood to be making £3 billion from the merger.

"Abramovich and Khodorkovsky are two of the cleverest guys in Russia," James Fenkner, head of research at Troika Dialog, a specialist investment company, said. "These guys got their assets for next to nothing and now they are cashing out."

Abramovich already has homes in Britain - an apartment in Knightsbridge and a 424-acre estate in Surrey - and he has said he wants to send his children to school in England. His business interests are controlled by a company called Millhouse Capital, based in Piccadilly. And now he has bought Chelsea FC, apparently because he thought it would allow him to have some fun.

Can that really be the reason? Those who have followed his career so far believe there was a far more serious motive behind the purchase. One seasoned observer of the Moscow business scene said: "Buying Chelsea was a masterstroke. If he can make the team a big success in Europe, which is highly likely, he will be a hero. It would not be a clever move to bring a politically-motivated action against someone with that kind of profile."

Perhaps not, but the list which bears Abramovich's name is still in a file somewhere in the Kremlin, and the clamour for snatching back the oligarchs' wealth grows almost daily. And as he says, no Russian tycoon can imagine he will never go to jail.