#4 - JRL 7301
Russia readies extradition request for Gusinsky
MOSCOW, Aug 26 (Reuters) - Russian prosecutors said on Tuesday they were preparing a request to extradite former Russian media baron Vladimir Gusinsky from Greece.
"The preparation of documents for the extradition of V. Gusinsky has begun," a statement from the prosecutor-general's office said.
Gusinsky, 51, was one of a small group of Russian businessmen who made vast fortunes in the immediate post-Soviet period, but fled Russia in 2000 after prosecutors opened a criminal case against him.
He was arrested at Athens airport on August 21 on an international warrant on suspicion of a $250 million fraud and a Greek prosecutor on Monday ordered him to be detained while the extradition issue was settled by Greece's top court.
His arrest came in the midst of a row between the Kremlin and another "oligarch," Mikhail Khodorkovsky, which has fuelled talk that President Vladimir Putin is reining in the super-rich elite ahead of parliamentary and presidential elections.
The statement by the Russian prosecutor-general's office said justice authorities were considering sending a team of investigators to Greece to back up the extradition request.
Court sources said in Athens on Monday that settling the question of Gusinsky's extradition was likely to take weeks rather than days.
Gusinsky, like other Russian oligarchs to emerge after the collapse of the Soviet Union, crumbling, made a fortune in the privatisations of the 1990s, but he lost his business in 2000 after falling foul of the Kremlin. He owned Russia's biggest independent television station NTV -- which won international acclaim for its coverage of Moscow's war in separatist Chechnya -- before the state wrested control from him using the company's massive debt as leverage.
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