Zee Beam News

07 May 2009 - The Moscow Times by Nikolaus von Twickel - A Moscow court has convicted an American who once worked at oil firm TNK-BP and his brother of spying on Gazprom and handed them suspended sentences, the Federal Security Service said Thursday. Ilya Zaslavsky and his brother Alexander received one year suspended sentences and two years probation on charges of industrial espionage, filed last year during a high-profile power struggle between the Russian and British owners of TNK-BP. Moscow's Tverskoi District Court ruled that the brothers, who also have Russian citizenship, had collected classified information about state energy giant Gazprom, an unidentified FSB official told Interfax. The official said the FSB had been tipped off by the employee of an energy firm who said the Zaslavskys had tried to buy company secrets from him. "The court found that the evidence provided by the FSB about Ilya and Alexander Zaslavsky's criminal behavior fully confirmed their guilt," the official said. It was unclear Thursday when the ruling had been made. Calls to the court's press office were not immediately answered. The brothers were arrested in March last year as TNK-BP's owners fought over their 50-50 ownership structure. Around the same time, the company came under scrutiny from law enforcement agencies — a development that some observers said suggested that one side was playing dirty by unfairly enlisting state assistance. But other observers linked the law enforcement scrutiny to a long-running dispute between Gazprom and TNK-BP over control of TNK-BP's flagship Kovykta gas field, saying Gazprom was trying to take over TNK-BP as well. The Zaslavsky brothers both graduated from Oxford University, and Ilya still heads the Moscow Oxford Society. At the time of his arrest, Ilya Zaslavsky, then 29, worked as a manager in TNK-BP's international affairs office. Alexander Zaslavsky, who is three years older, worked as an independent energy consultant and headed the British Alumni Club, a graduate network run by the British Council. The British Council at the time had been forced to close most of its offices in Russia because of a dispute that the Foreign Ministry has linked to British demands that State Duma Deputy Andrei Lugovoi be extradited to face murder charges in the poisoning death of former security services officer Alexander Litvinenko.