Overall, shares registered their sharpest decline for more than four years: the Russian Trading System Index (RTS) plunged at the start of trading, to close 10 per cent lower. Trading in the oil giant Yukos was suspended for an hour after a precipitate fall at the start of the day. It ended 17 per cent lower, and Sibneft, the smaller oil company Yukos has agreed to buy, lost 19 per cent of its value. Handyjeremy.warner independent.co.uk. Perhaps wisely, he’s leaving himself lots of time to do so, four years in fact. That’s long enough for everyone to forget what his promises were in the first place. It’s fallen to the new man at the helm, Todd Stitzer, to sort out the resulting mess.

At a cost of £900m, he’s proposing to axe 20 per cent of factory capacity and 5,500 jobs, all for an eventual saving of £400m a year. Mr Stitzer calls his restructuring plan “Fuel for Growth”, and if he sticks to the script by funnelling the bulk of the cost savings back into marketing and innovation, he may succeed. Mr Putin says one thing in saying that business people won’t be arbitrarily attacked by the state, but his subordinates practise another. For investors, Russian remains high risk, but that’s the price you have to pay for high opportunity and return.CadburyCadbury Schweppes has spent nearly £5bn on acquisitions over the past three years.

Yet it has done more in terms of economic and political reform in the 14 years since the fall of communism than most countries achieve in a century of development. Who’s in control here?On almost every level, the Khodorkovsky affair shows that Russia is not yet at all like the developed West. Privately, he would agree with the underlying message sent to the Russian super-rich – stick to business and don’t interfere in politics – but publicly he’s bound to be alarmed by the over enthusiasm of his subordinates in ensuring that the message is heard The last thing he needs is another flight of capital. To a greater or lesser degree, they all have murky pasts.That the judiciary is prepared to pursue trumped up charges against Mr Khodorkovsky for the underlying crime of political meddling displays an intolerable disregard for the rule of law that investors are right to be wary of. Power is being applied is an arbitrary and dictatorial manner – another aspect of old, Soviet Russia that has not yet been fully exorcised from the body politic.Mr Putin moved yesterday to distance himself from the affair by saying that justice must take its course. Virtually all the Russian oligarchs and the great majority of the country’s successful entrepreneurs would be behind bars if the Putin regime were to apply the same standards of justice to them as it appears to be with Mr Khodorkovsky.

Mr Putin understands it as well as the Russian oligarchs he seems to be targeting.So why is he trying to undermine them? Well actually, it’s not all of them, just a small number. There is nothing to suggest this is the start of a broadside assault on private capital in Russia. Mr Khodorkovsky’s chief sin has nothing to do with the charges against him for tax evasion and malfeasance.Rather it is to do with his political ambitions. Most other Russian oligarchs have chosen to stay out of politics. Not so Mr Khodorkovsky, who has taken such umbrage at various aspects of Mr Putin’s tax regime that he’s promised to fund the election of 20 Yukos MPs to vote it down. He’s also said a number of injudicious things about Mr Putin himself. Of course, this is of itself a worrying aspect of the whole affair.