Russia: The Russian oil company Yukos has been implicated in Spanish money-laundering and company executives are in British courts as well. Chris Stephen reports from Moscow.
In a London court yesterday, Yukos senior executives Natalia Cherysheva and Dmiti Marnev fought a Russian attempt to extradite them to face massive fraud charges.
Marnev, an accountant, and Chernysheva, a lawyer, are accused by Moscow of defrauding the regional government of Volgagrad - formerly Stalingrad - of more than $2 billion in oil revenue in 1997.
This hearing comes the day after Spanish police swooped on 41 people, including Yukos executives, in the biggest money-laundering investigation in Spanish history.
Spanish, French and Dutch prosecutors say they suspect over $300 million of Yukos money was laundered by the suspects, who include former employees.
In the United States, Yukos lawyers are trying to fight a takeover of company assets by Russian oil and gas companies in a Houston court.
What unites all three cases is the extraordinary battle between Russia's most powerful man - President Vladimir Putin - and the man who was its richest oil tycoon, Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
Khodorkovsky was once the poster-boy of Russia's tycoons. Having acquired Yukos, the country's biggest oil company, for $350 million, a fraction of its true worth, 10 years ago, the tycoon grew rich on the profits.
By 2003 Yukos was pumping 1 per cent of all the world's oil and Khodorkovsky's wealth had grown to $15 billion.
This oil baron was not shy about showing off. The lobby of the gleaming new Yukos headquarters in downtown Moscow was draped with wall-to-ceiling pictures of their beloved chief.
Then the investigators struck, arresting him at gunpoint in October 2003 and charging him and his company with avoiding a cool $9 billion in taxes.
Most in Moscow think Khodorkovsky was targeted for breaking Moscow's unwritten rule - tycoons should stay out of politics. Khodorkovsky had begun funding parties opposed to Putin.
"He stepped over the line," said one western businessman in Moscow.
"If you're involved in business, better stay clear of politics."
But the battle for Yukos quickly spread beyond Russia's shores.
After his arrest, Khodorkovsky handed control of Menatep, the Yukos parent company, to a British lawyer, Stephen Curtis. Curtis had already grown rich working for Menatep.
Then in March last year a helicopter he was travelling in mysteriously exploded in mid-air and crashed near Bournemouth, killing him and the pilot.
The cause of the explosion has yet to be fully explained.
Last December, Moscow forced Yukos to sell its main production plant, Yugansk, to pay its back tax bill.
But the investigations continued, with the arrest that same month of Yukos lawyer Svetlana Bakhmina in a fraud inquiry. Bakhmina has been on hunger strike for the past fortnight in protest at the refusal of prison authorities to let her speak to her sons since being incarcerated.
Moscow's respected and normally dry business newspaper, Vedemosti, called her detention a return to the "Lubyanka of the 1930s" - a reference to Stalin's KGB headquarters.
And human rights groups in Europe have pleaded with the Kremlin to at least let her talk to her boys by phone.
In January, the Council of Europe's parliament accused Moscow of a political vendetta against Yukos, saying: "The state's action in these cases goes beyond the mere pursuit of criminal justice, to include such elements as to weaken an outspoken political opponent, to intimidate other wealthy individuals and to regain control of strategic economic assets."
In London a third Yukos executive, Aleksander Gorbachev, is due to face extradition proceedings and more executives have stayed in Britain rather than return home and face possible arrest.
Moscow is already angry at Britain's decision to give asylum to another exiled tycoon, Boris Berezosky, and to Chechen rebel leader Akhmed Zakayev. Friendly relations between prime minister Tony Blair and Putin are a distant memory.
Yukos is now a shadow of its former self. Yet it remains defiant, with spokesman Alexander Shadrin denying the company broke the law in Spain and blaming over-zealous prosecutors. "The only place left to look is Mars," he told a Moscow radio station.
Ordinary Russians have little sympathy for Khodorkovsky, angry that he once flaunted his wealth at a time when millions of ordinary people struggle to make ends meet.
But Europe's politicians are facing a bleak choice. Relations with Russia are already poor after quarrels over Chechnya, Ukraine and Iran.
Now Brussels must either turn a blind eye to Russia's pursuit of Yukos officials, or take sides and incur Moscow's wrath.