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Putin’s powerful chief of staff resigns

* Voloshin’s resignation over arrest of top oil tycoon widens political scandal

MOSCOW: Moscow press reported Wednesday that Kremlin’s powerful chief of staff had resigned in protest of the arrest of a top oil tycoon in a widening political scandal on the eve of Russian parliamentary elections.

The Vedomosti business daily said that President Vladimir Putin had accepted Alexander Voloshin’s resignation on Monday night after meeting for several hours with top Kremlin officials.

The Kremlin press office refused to comment on the reports and the Kommersant business daily said that a formal announcement about Voloshin’s dismissal would not be made for several days until his replacement had been found. The Interfax news agency quoted an unnamed Kremlin source as saying that Putin had not yet signed any decrees about changes within his administration.

Newspaper reports said that Voloshin had handed in his resignation on Saturday only hours after Russia’s richest man, Yukos chief Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was hauled in by secret service men at gunpoint in a Siberian airport and flown to Moscow for questioning.

Voloshin, 47, is seen as one of the last figures in the Kremlin to have hung on from the era of Putin’s predecessor Boris Yeltsin and a leader of an administration clan known as “the Family” that battled the hawkish “siloviki” camp of former secret service agents that recently emerged in Putin’s court. He was seen as a strong backer of big business and an instrumental Kremlin aide who managed to skilfully mediate between the various administration factions and parliament lawmakers on key economic reform issues.

His potential resignation had been rumoured in Moscow for months as the Family — which supported big businesses including Yukos — was being squeezed out by the “siloviki” clan.

Vedomosti reported that Voloshin was furious that Putin had not informed him of Khodorkovsky’s imminent arrest and that he learned of it only after the fact. Western inventors said that Voloshin’s resignation — if officially confirmed — would mark an escalation of political instability on the eve of December 7 parliamentary elections.

“Assuming Voloshin’s departure is confirmed today, this will only underline the seriousness of the political crisis resulting from Putin’s decision to deal with the political problem of Khodorkovsky using KGB methods,” the United Financial Group wrote in a research note. The investment house noted that Voloshin “seems to have made himself indispensable to Putin as a discreet but effective administrator with a good grasp of the reform policy agenda and adept at arbitrating between competing interests.” Besides heading Putin’s administration, Voloshin for the past four years has also served as chairman of the board of the United Energy System electricity monopoly that has been struggling to undertake reforms for the past four years.

But the United Financial Group predicted that Putin would probably try to seek a balance within his administration and was unlikely to give the post to any of the top members of the secret service Kremlin factions. Voloshin became deputy head of Yeltsin’s administration in 1998 and became chief of staff the following year.

He was attributed with drafting economic portions of Yeltsin’s speeches. Putin kept Voloshin on his post when he took the presidency following Yeltsin’s abrupt resignation on December 31, 1999. If Voloshin does resign, Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov will be the last remaining survivor from the Yeltsin era in Putin’s regime. —AFP

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