Another Tycoon Defies the Kremlin

On Sept. 15, Mikhail Prokhorov, Russia’s third-richest man (and owner of the New Jersey Nets), said he was stepping down as chairman of the pro-business Pravoye Delo party because the government had hijacked it. Prokhorov took the post in June with the government’s blessing, and promised to spend almost $90 million to get the party’s candidates elected to Parliament in December. Yet in recent weeks he had repeatedly criticized the country’s leadership, saying that Russia was becoming a “farce and parody of the Soviet Union.”

The Kremlin has not commented on Prokhorov’s outburst, which recalls the clash between former oil baron Mikhail Khodorkovsky and then-President Vladimir Putin. Khodorkovsky ended up in jail, his oil empire dismantled. Ariel Cohen, a senior research fellow in Russian and Eurasian Studies at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, says the Kremlin does not want another Khodorkovsky trial, which generated bad publicity. Yet even if Prokhorov does not end up behind bars, his companies could suffer from frosty relations with the state.