Georgian tycoon found dead in mansion

Do the British police have another Alexander Litvinenko on their hands? The flamboyant Georgian business tycoon Badri Patarkatsishvili (pictured) was found dead late on Tuesday night at his £10m mansion in Surrey. He is a sworn enemy of Georgia's president, Mikhail Saakashvili. A family spokesman said he suffered a heart attack, but police are treating the death as suspicious.

Patarkatsishvili had been living in self-imposed exile at the house in Leatherhead ever since Georgian authorities accused him of plotting a coup against President Saakashvili last year. Like the late FSB agent Litvinenko, Patarkatsishvili was a friend of the exiled Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky.

Georgian authorities blamed Patarkatsishvili, and a television station he owned, for stirring mass protests against the president on the streets of the capital Tiblisi in November. The protests were crushed by riot police and the TV station and other assets were seized.

A month ago, Patarkatsishvili ran against Saakashvili in Georgia's presidential election and won seven per cent of the votes. But he did not return to campaign in his homeland for fear of arrest.

The mustachioed tycoon, who made his estimated $6bn fortune during the privatisation of state industries in Russia in the 1990s, was only 52. One reason for suspicion is the publication before Christmas of extracts from a taped conversation said to have taken place between a Georgian interior ministry official and a Chechen hit-man.

The two men allegedly discussed two options for making Patarkatsishvili "disappear completely". One option - which echoed the killing of Litvinenko in November 2006 - involved murdering Patarkatsishvili during one of his regular visits to London. The other was to kill him as he flew in his private jet to his castle in southern Georgia.

Patarkatsishvili told the Sunday Times: "I know about this tape... I have 120 bodyguards but I know that's not enough. I don't feel safe anywhere and that is why I'm particularly not going to Georgia."