It emerged last weekend that Litvinenko travelled to Israel just weeks before he died to hand over evidence to a Russian billionaire of how agents working for President Putin dealt with his enemies running the Yukos oil company.
According to Israel Inside, Leonid Nevzlin, former CEO of the oil giant Yukos and current chairman of the Diaspora Museum in Tel Aviv, said the former Russian spy had come to Israel in the weeks before his murder with classified documents on Yukos that might be damaging to Russian leaders. Nevzlin estimated that Litvinenko’s death had been connected with this information, which he had handed to London police investigators of the murder.
In its turn, DEBKA file’s intelligence sources add that the Russian ex-spy is believed to have been a double agent, who sold trade secrets to different parties in and outside Russia, among them some of the Russian oligarchs living in exile in the West. Livinenko served in a Russian FSB unit which investigated and carried out special operations against businessmen, the media points out.
According to Israel Insider, Nevzlin, a Jewish Russian billionaire who fled his native country when it became apparent that the government was targeting Yukos Oil owners and executives, became an Israeli citizen in 2003. Yukos Oil was subsequently broken up and sold to a Russian state-owned firm for roughly half its estimated value. The document handed over to Nevzlin by Litvinenko reportedly contains "startling" information relating to the prosecution and forced sale of the company.
