It’s that time of year again, time to lay out amid the trash and sunbathers along the Moscow river, and time for the FSB to go through the list of British Embassy to staff pick a random "spy."Last summer, UK Trade Representative Andrew Levi got an early ticket home after the FSB accused him of being a spy. This year, Chris Bowers -- head of the UK Trade and Investment Office -- wins the prize: an unexpected trip to London for an even more unexpected English summer.
As it happens, Bowers served as a stringer for the BBC in Uzbekistan during the 1990s. This makes him a spy, according to the FSB.
Even if Bowers is a spy – and who can tell these days – the timing of his expulsion is less than subtle. The battle for control of TNK-BP will only get wosre.
It is not known, however, why the Kremlin is taking so long to issue BP a bill for “unpaid taxes,” conveniently equal to the company's market capitalization. At current prices, that’s just over $200 billion -- a sum which BP has no doubt declined to pay the Russian government.
Problem solved: BP gets booted from the country, the Kremlin gets control of the Siberian fields, the lawyers get rich, and nobody gets called a spy.
1 comment:
The Russians never accused Andrew Levi of being a spy. Anyone who knows him well knows that he is a senior British diplomat with a distinguished record in European and economic diplomacy and post-conflict reconstruction, notably in the Balkans. He was expelled purely in retaliation for the British expulsion from London of Russian officials, in connection with the murder of Alexander Litvenienko.
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