Political back-stabbing hits Putin court amid shakeup rumors
By Dmitry Zaks
MOSCOW (AFP): The seemingly inevitable war between competing clans in President Vladimir Putin's oddly balanced government broke out in the open Thursday amid mutual charges of tax evasion and corruption.
However few expected the scandal could come close to touching the omnipotent Putin himself.
One of the stars in Russia's latest political drama is Promstroybank, until now a little known Saint Petersburg bank which was raided by unidentified crack police troops last week.
The bank's director, according to a detailed but -- as is often the case in Russia -- unsoured article in the respected Obshchaya Gazeta weekly is a close personal friend of Putin.
Promstroybank serviced some of Saint Petersburg's financial accounts, which Putin and several of his current ministers helped to oversee when he was the city's deputy mayor in the early 1990s.
One of those ministers is the liberal Russian finance tsar, Deputy Prime Minister Alexei Kudrin, who admitted Thursday that Saint Petersburg prosecutors had called him in for questioning this week.
Kudrin was grilled about allegations that city funds were misappropriated in the years when Putin was deputy mayor.
"I gave the whole picture about how the finances were used, and in my view, the prosecutor was completely satisfied," Kudrin told reports on Thursday.
Journalists and commentators, long used to reading the murky Kremlin ins-and-outs through such incidents, wondered who would dare investigate a bank so closely linked to the president and his friends.
"Whoever is trying to get the next prime minister assignment organized this raid," said Andrei Piontkovsky of Moscow's Center of Strategic Studies.
"The war is on between Putin's old KGB clan and their Saint Petersburg liberal rivals" who are promoting Kudrin for the post of prime minister, Piontkovsky said.
"The KGB group (led by increasingly powerful Security Council Secretary Sergei Ivanov) is attacking Kudrin, and Kudrin is defending himself by showing Putin that his own reputation is coming under fire from this evil police clan," Piontkovsky said.
"Kudrin's summoning for questioning is alleged to have been instigated by Ivanov, with the aim of discrediting his rival," agreed Tom Adshead of the Troika Dialog brokerage firm.
When the presidency fell into Putin's lap during Boris Yeltsin's stunning New Year's Eve resignation, he pieced together a government that was split somewhat evenly between people he knew from his days in the KGB, Saint Petersburg, and the old Kremlin ruling faction -- Yeltsin's "family."
Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov -- with his known "family" links -- came to head the government as a consensus figure. But few expected him to stay long.
Indeed Putin has voiced almost daily disapproval with Kasyanov's government over the past week.
"I find the president's criticism completely normal," Kasyanov shrugged Thursday.
But Piontkovsky stressed: "Kasyanov and the family know that their days are numbered."
The picture gets more clouded as Kasyanov and his allies like Boris Berezovsky attempt to mount their own counterattack.
Kudrin, for one, on Thursday publicly assured Putin that he is closely investigating reports that Berezovsky-linked companies are avoiding their taxes.
"Law enforcement officials are actively involved in this work," Kudrin said, a statement that prompts some to suggest that the Promstroybank may have been mounted by Kasyanov's allies as a show of their remaining force.
Meanwhile Western observers long used to political turmoil in Moscow wryly suggest that things are not yet as bad as they could be.
"The rumors have yet to reach anything like the fever pitch which they did before the real dismissals in the past, under Yeltsin, so we continue to think that we are safe, at least until the budget is passed" by parliament in mid-December, Adshead said.