Bank raid could have been warning against planned WikiLeaks Russian corruption expose says Alexander Lebedev

By Glen Owen And Will Stewart
Updated:

Billionaire newspaper magnate Alexander Lebedev could have been targeted in a raid by secret service agents as a warning against co-operating with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to expose Russian corruption. 

Sources in Moscow believe that Mr Lebedev, owner of The Independent and the London Evening Standard in the UK and the Novaya Gazeta in Russia, was being sent a ‘message’ not to threaten powerful interests.

The Mail on Sunday told last week how Mr Lebedev’s National Reserve Bank was raided by dozens of heavily armed law-enforcement officers, on the pretext of a fraud investigation, leaving the former KGB spy fearing he would be arrested.

Targeted: Billionaire newspaper magnate Alexander Lebedev was planning to collaborate with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to expose corruption in Russia

Targeted: Billionaire newspaper magnate Alexander Lebedev was planning to collaborate with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to expose corruption in Russia

Last night, Mr Lebedev said that one of his Russian journalists met Mr Assange at his base in Sweden – but it was ‘just a guess’ that the move provoked the raid.

Wikileaks recently caused huge embarrassment to America and Britain by releasing almost half a million secret US files on military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Last month it announced that it was planning to make public classified documents about the ‘despotic’ Moscow regime. 

There is speculation the papers focus on hidden business links and fortunes of government figures, top-level corruption or covert espionage operations.

Russia’s domestic security service, the FSB – formerly the KGB – reacted angrily to the threat.

Mr Lebedev, who has campaigned against corruption for more than a decade, said a ‘young, talented and brave’ reporter from Novaya Gazeta visited the WikiLeaks boss – an assignation the FSB is likely to have known about.

‘He went to Sweden and he met Assange and he has spoken to him on the phone a number of times,’ he said. 

Meeting: One of Lebedev's Russian journalists had met with founder and editor of the WikiLeaks website, Julian Assange

Meeting: One of Lebedev's Russian journalists had met with founder and editor of the WikiLeaks website, Julian Assange

Asked if that could have provoked the raid, he said: ‘It is just a guess – one of the possibilities.

‘But I don’t think the information [on Russian corruption] is being contained in one place. The information is all over the world, in dozens of jurisdictions such as Belize,
Luxembourg, Monaco, involving lots of front companies and what I call “dirty lawyers”.’

The Kremlin is known to be nervous about the leak threat, with one FSB source threatening to make Wikileaks ‘inaccessible forever’.

Mr Lebedev declared yesterday that ‘the fight against corruption should be compared to the fight against apartheid’.

He warned: ‘Mr Assange should be looking for allies –  people who can look into the computers in the banks.

‘But I would rather advise him against going to Russia after announcing that he is going to tackle its corruption.’ 

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