Russian authorities said Tuesday they had placed a top billionaire, Vladimir Yevtushenkov, under house arrest pending the results of an investigation of charges against him of money-laundering.

The detention and probe of 65-year-old Yevtushenkov — who is Russia’s 15th-richest man with a personal fortune of $9 billion (7 billion euros) according to Forbes magazine — was officially linked to his company’s acquisition of shares in an oil firm, Bashneft.

Russia’s federal Investigative Committee said it had launched the probe because it has “sufficient grounds to believe that AFK Sistema board chairman Vladimir Yevtushenkov is involved in the legalisation (money-laundering) of property acquired by criminal means”.

But some Russian businessmen and commentators drew a parallel with a politically-motivated attack against a former oil tycoon, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who spent a decade behind bars as his Yukos firm was dismantled.

The Investigative Committee reports directly to Russian President Vladimir Putin. And Rosneft — the Putin-favoured oil giant that bought Yukos’s top assets — is keen to get its hands on Bashneft, according to a report early this year by the business daily Vedomosti.

Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov dismissed that talk, telling Russian reporters he was “categorically” against any attempt to liken Yevtushenkov’s arrest to what happened to Yukos.

AFK Sistema — which also holds major interests in the country’s biggest mobile telephone company MTS, travel firm Intourist and a range of other assets — said the accusation against Yevtushenkov was “without foundation”.

“We are going to use all our energy to contest it,” a company spokeswoman, Yekaterina Tsukanova, told AFP.

– ‘Similar to Yukos’ –

The news of the billionaire’s arrest spread through Moscow’s business and political circles late Tuesday, deepening uncertainty stemming from an economy battered by Western sanctions and capital flight.

Alexander Shokhin, head of the Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, an influential big business lobby group to which Yevtushenkov also belongs, drew a direct line between the latest arrest and the attack against Khodorkovsky.

“It is certainly very similar to a ‘Yukos Number 2’,” Shokhin told the Interfax news agency.

Yukos was once Russia’s biggest oil company but was broken up after Khodorkovsky’s arrest in 2003, shortly after Putin warned Russia’s growing class of oligarchs against meddling in politics.

After being pushed into bankruptcy, Yukos was carved up and sold off in opaque auctions to state companies.