NIKOLAI MAKSIMOV, one of the richest men in Russia, was sitting in a grimy jail cell in the Ural Mountains.
Through the murk, Mr. Maksimov saw his cellmate — a man, he says, who appeared ill with tuberculosis, a scourge in Russian prisons. “I had the feeling that I was put in this cell on purpose,” Mr. Maksimov, now free on bail, recalled recently.
Mr. Maksimov, who was arrested in February on suspicion of embezzling hundreds of millions of dollars, is hardly the only Russian tycoon who has run into trouble. Among the six men who have topped the Forbes rich list here in the last decade, one, Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, is in prison, and another, Boris A. Berezovsky, is in exile. They, like Mr. Maksimov, maintain their innocence.
Even before the authorities here acted last week to quash protests against the government and Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin, Russia’s rich were growing agitated, too. Evidence is mounting that conditions are deteriorating for the maintenance and investment of their vast wealth — and while this development may gladden populists, it may become an economic threat.
Post-Soviet privatizations shifted state-owned factories into the hands of a coterie of well-connected businessmen — the oligarchs. Partly as a result, Russia has 101 billionaires, behind only China, with 115, and the United States, with 412, according to Forbes.
Only now, capital flight, a problem in the 1990s, has re-emerged. Money is flowing out of Russia faster than it is flowing in. The net outflow is expected to reach $70 billion by year-end, and the figures suggest that the bulk of that will be from large investors.
Yaroslav Lissovolik, chief economist for Deutsche Bank here, notes that “the scale of capital flight has more than compensated for the rise of oil prices.”
Even if oil output is maintained and crude prices stay relatively high, according to Russian finance ministry estimates, the nation’s current account will slip into deficit by 2014. Then Russia’s economy, like that of the United States, will depend on an inflow of investment, economists say.
The Russian government has recently made modest gains in attracting foreign investment. The problem is that for every foreign company that invests — from Exxon on the Russian Arctic Shelf to Cisco Systems in a high-technology park going up outside Moscow — far more Russian entrepreneurs head for the exits, gauging the risks too great.
Officials understand that oil can take Russia only so far and are eager to lure investment from all quarters. “The amazing thing is that they are doing far better with the foreign investors than the locals,” says Clemens Grafe, chief economist at Goldman Sachs here.
It’s hard to know how big a role cases like Mr. Maksimov’s have played. Mr. Maksimov, 54, is withering in his criticism of the authorities. The suggestion is that his business enemies enlisted the police to try to persuade him to resolve a dispute.
“I was on the Forbes list; now I’m going to jail,” he says. “It’s normal. It’s Russia.”
His troubles began three years ago, when he sued Vladimir S. Lisin, another steel tycoon, touching off the dispute that eventually led to Mr. Maksimov’s arrest.
The two had made a deal, which quickly soured, for Mr. Lisin to buy 50 percent plus one share of Mr. Maksimov’s company, the Maxi Group. Maxi was estimated at the time to be worth $1.2 billion after debts. Mr. Lisin’s company, Novolipetsk, paid Mr. Maksimov an advance of $317 million. It was to pay the remainder after an outside auditor estimated the extent of the company’s debt, within 90 days.
Executives of Novolipetsk declined to pay. In an interview at its headquarters here, lawyers for Novolipetsk accused Mr. Maksimov of transferring large sums out of the Maxi Group to the bank account of his girlfriend. He denied the accusation, saying he had been buying out shares that his girlfriend, who was also a business partner, owned in business subsidiaries.
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