Russian media respond to Gusinsky warrant

Gusinsky is now running his business from abroad

Russian newspapers have reacted sceptically to an arrest warrant issued for media boss Vladimir Gusinsky.

Mr Gusinsky is being sought for failing to return to Moscow for questioning over alleged fraud. But the Russian press is taking it as read that the motives for going after him are exclusively political.

Moskovsky Komsomolets said the effect of the warrant would be limited.

Brushes with the law are nothing new

"There is no real danger of Gusinsky being banged up because of the arrest warrant. Nobody will recognise it abroad. But it stops him from returning to Russia, because he is unlikely to volunteer to go back inside the Butyrka prison."

Mr Gusinsky was arrested in June and held for several days before being released without charge. He was being questioned over the business affairs of his company, Media-Most.

Prosecutors say they want to question him over a proposed deal with the Gazprom company.

On the sidelines

Mr Gusinsky has spent most of his time abroad since that arrest.

"He will, of course, be able to run his business from abroad for a while," Moskovsky Komsomolets said.

"But eventually that business will be taken over by players who are in the thick of the action. When that happens, Gusinsky will no longer be a man with real influence on politics in Russia. Nobody will care what he thinks."

The charges against Gusinsky are probably just a precaution. Nobody is going to hunt him down through Interpol.

Kommersant

The business newspaper Kommersant agreed that the arrest warrant was purely symbolic.

But what was more, the paper said, the whole reason for the questioning was about to go away, after Media-Most agreed to reimburse the disputed sum to Gazprom in a share deal.

"This action is entirely pointless, at least from the practical point of view. Media-Most and Gazprom have done a deal which states they have no claims against each other, and this revokes Gazprom's request for criminal proceedings."

"Thus the victim in the fraud case has won compensation. The prosecutor's office must have known this, but once again it decided to inflame the situation."

No case to answer

Mr Gusinsky's own Segodnya newspaper said the authorities had finally made it clear that their vendetta against Gusinsky was nothing to do with alleged fraud.

"By signing the warrant, they revealed the 'Kremlin secret' that they have been trying clumsily to conceal - that the Media-Most case is purely political."

"Judge for yourselves - until the very last minute, the Kremlin was claiming that Guskinsky's travails are all about the dispute between Gazprom and Media-Most."

"But the bone of contention between them was removed when they signed a peace deal."

BBC Monitoring, based in Caversham in southern England, selects and translates information from radio, television, press, news agencies and the internet from 150 countries in more than 70 languages.