Putin bails out his billionaire pals

Vladimir Putin (pictured) is making sure his billionaire oligarch chums do not suffer too badly from the financial crisis. Earlier this week it was revealed that Russia's richest man, Oleg Deripaska, had been granted $4.5 billion from state coffers to repay loans to foreign banks. But he is not the only beneficiary of the Kremlin's largesse.

Other Putin's chums who are quids in include Mikhail Fridman, who has received $2bn so that his Alfa Group can hold onto its 44 per cent stake in Vimpelcom, Russia's second-largest mobile telephone company. Igor Sechin, the chairman of the state-controlled oil company Rosneft, is said to have received a cool $800 million. And the Russian press reports that loans have been made to PIK, the property company led by Yuri Zhukov, and to Vladimir Yakunin, the chairman of the state-owned Russian Railways. All are close friends of Prime Minister Putin.

The billion dollar hand-outs come from VEB, the country's state development bank. It had claimed that individual companies would receive no more $2.5 billion from the $50 billion fund provided by the Government. So clearly, poor old Deripaska was a special needs case.

But the bail-outs have their critics. Aleksandr Lebedev, a wealthy businessman and former KGB officer who once spied from the Soviet embassy in London, is one of them. He said: "You should just tell the population you got cheated in the 1990s, they gave it all to these chaps who have now just bought it back again. Then you could privatise these assets in a few years, but privatise them in the proper way." Nice try, Aleksandr.