RUSSIA: Russian tycoon and former deputy prime minister Anatoly Chubais survived an assassination attempt yesterday outside Moscow.
The car of Mr Chubais, head of United Energy Systems, was ambushed with a roadside bomb and machine-gun fire as he drove on the outskirts of the capital.
In an attack elaborate even by the standards of Russia's mafia, a landmine was detonated as Mr Chubais's black armoured BMW drove along the Minsk Highway from his summer house at 9.30am.
The blast just missed the car, and two machine-gunners in combat dress then opened fire from nearby woods.
Bullets bounced off the armoured chassis, and bodyguards following in a jeep then returned fire.
Television pictures showed four jagged holes left by bullets in his armoured car and another impact in the bullet-proof glass of the windshield.
The attackers escaped, and bodyguards followed their footprints through the snow but lost them in the forest. Hours after the attack, Mr Chubais (49) told a press conference he was fairly sure who tried to kill him and had been prepared for attack.
"I have an idea of who could have taken out a contract on me. We had reason to believe something like this might happen," he said.
He refused to name his suspects, saying he had passed names to the police. But attention is likely to focus on the losers in a bold plan to privatise UES and open it up to competition.
The attack is the most serious gangland-style ambush since last July, when the American editor of Forbes Russia, Paul Klebnikov, was killed by machine-gun fire in a Moscow street.
Mr Chubais is one of Russia's most controversial figures, with many enemies in both business and politics.
As deputy prime minister in the 1990s, he masterminded Russia's gallop into the market economy.
Millions of Russians saw the vouchers they were given for privatised companies rendered worthless, while a handful of tycoons grew fabulously rich.
The breakneck privatisation programme, undertaken in the early 1990s with former prime minister Yegor Gaidar, is blamed by many for the "gangster capitalism" image Russia soon acquired.
Last November Mr Chubais told one Russian newspaper he had been the target of three assassination attempts, though he refused to say who was responsible. He also played the key role in securing the re-election of former president Boris Yeltsin in 1996, when it seemed the country was poised to return to communism.
In 1998 he jumped from politics to business, being catapulted to the head of Russia's power monopoly, UES.
During Mr Chubais's tenure as prime minister the term "hostile takeover" often meant what it said, with attacks such as yesterday's ambush running at more than one a week. But in recent years such killings have become less common.
The leader of Mr Chubais's political party, Boris Nemtsov of the Union of the Right-Wing Forces, said the attack was political rather than economic. "It is very obvious this assassination attempt has a political character and is not connected to the reforms of UES," he said.
Mr Chubais said he would continue his plans to privatise the power industry and push for economic reforms. "Everything that I have done - in reforming the country's power sector, and in uniting the country's democratic parties - I will continue doing, with twice the strength," he said.
The attack is likely to further shake Muscovites, already worried about possible terrorist bombs in the capital following the killing of Chechen rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov earlier this month.