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The Moscow Times was the only newspaper represented at the Russian-American Business Summit, which participated in by Dmitry Medvedev and Barak Obama

On 7 July 2009 The Moscow Times published a special full colour issue of the newspaper, timed to coincide with the visit of Barak Obama to Moscow.

The newspaper was presented at the Russian-American Business Summit, which was organized by the American Chamber of Commerce (AmCham) and the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RUIE) at Manezh. The forum drew the participation of more than 700 key representatives of Russian and international business, the political elite and non-governmental organizations.



Friday, July 10, 2009 Updated at 10 July 2009 0:46 Moscow Time.

The Moscow Times » Issue 3228 » Crime

Canadian Lives to Tell His Tale

11 August 2005By Carl Schreck / The Moscow Times

City Crime Statistics
Aug. 3 – Aug. 9
Crime	Total	Solved
Murder	14	7
Assault	25	16
Robbery	284	138
Rape	7	6
Theft (total)	1,004	245
Apartment burglaries	263	16
Fraud	81	53
Car theft	52	17
For the Record
Car accidents	178
a) killed	17
b) injured	196
Public drunkenness	3,713
a) detained overnight	1,164
Suicides	24
Missing persons	44
Bodies discovered	76
Source: Moscow police

First he had to give up his Mercedes to avoid being killed. Then a man who owed him $1 million tried to kill him, and his girlfriend took out a contract hit on his life. In February, he was kidnapped and forced to pay a ransom of $1.5 million.

Incredibly, businessman Igor Lantsov, who claims to be a victim of circumstance, has not soured on working in Russia and is forging ahead with plans to build several golf courses. Maybe only after that will he go home to Canada.

"I don't walk around with bodyguards, and I don't owe anybody any money. It's strange, but what can you do?" Lantsov said of his recurring troubles.

Moscow city prosecutors on Tuesday charged two men, including a Moscow region police officer, in the February kidnapping of Lantsov, the vice president of the Russian National Association of Professional Golf and a former deputy director of the Kremlin Trading House, which provides food to the Kremlin, Vremya Novostei reported Wednesday.

Alexander Bondar, a detective in the Moscow region police's tax crime department, was detained on July 19 at a dacha village in the Shchyolkovsky district of the Moscow region, the newspaper said.

The other suspect, Adlan Batukayev, was detained at Domodedovo Airport while going through passport control on his way out of the country, Kommersant reported. It was unclear when he was detained. The newspaper said police had identified a total of 12 suspects in the kidnapping.

Sergei Marchenko, a spokesman for the City Prosecutor's Office, could not confirm Wednesday that Batukayev and Bondar had been charged, and declined to comment on the kidnapping.

Lantsov, 42, said he was abducted on Feb. 19 as he left a restaurant on Ulitsa Sretenka, near the Sukharevskaya metro station, after a meal with Batukayev, whom he called a casual acquaintance.

"He invited me to dinner supposedly to introduce me to some businessmen from Western Siberia," Lantsov said. "At first, I wasn't going accept the invitation, but at the last moment I reconsidered."

Lantsov said he was stopped outside the restaurant by three men who asked him to get into a car with police license plates. One of the men flashed a police badge, he said.

"I knew they had no reason to detain me, so I declined and told them it was late and I wanted to go home," Lantsov said by telephone.

The men then pushed him into the car, handcuffed him and put a bag over his head, Lantsov said. "I tried to resist, and I kicked out the window on the left back door, but they beat me up," he said.

Lantsov said the assailants then drove him to a dacha in Korolyov, about 10 kilometers northeast of Moscow. There they demanded that he transfer $2 million into an account in Riga-based bank Aizkraukles Banka in exchange for his release. "I told them I didn't have $2 million, so they said they would settle for $1.5 million," Lantsov said. "I said I could do that, but I asked what guarantees I had that they wouldn't kill me anyway. They told me there was no guarantee, that I would have to take their word for it."

The kidnappers released him near Domodedovo Airport on March 1 after he had transferred the money from an account at the Swiss bank UBS, Lantsov said.

Lantsov subsequently contacted police and alerted Aizkraukles Banka. He said $400,000 had already been withdrawn from the bank and the bank had frozen the rest of the funds. He said the account was registered to a company called Midcomb Ltd.

A spokesman at Aizkraukles Banka's Moscow branch declined to comment, saying the bank could not disclose information about clients' accounts.

The two suspects have been charged with kidnapping and extortion, and Bondar faces a third charge of abuse of authority, Vremya Novostei reported. If convicted, they each could serve up to 20 years in prison.

Lantsev said the first time he faced a threat on his life was in 1995, when the Mercedes he was driving on Volokolamskoye Shosse in northwestern Moscow was carjacked by several men. He said the men took him to a forest and threatened to kill him but he convinced them to let him go in exchange for the car.

He said a man who owed him $1 million tried to kill him in 1998.

But the incident that grabbed national headlines occurred in December 2003. His girlfriend, Anastasia Nasinovskaya, 21, became enraged when Lantsov demanded that she return a brand-new BMW and asked a friend to kill him for $15,000. The would-be killer, Ivan Sentyurin, went to police, who organized a sting operation and arrested Nasinovskaya after she handed over a down payment of $10,000 -- money that Lantsov said came from his own pocket.

Nasinovskaya, a runner-up in the 1997 Miss Moscow beauty pageant, was charged with trying to organize a murder, but Lantsov then had a sudden change of heart. He hired an expensive lawyer to defend Nasinovskaya and eventually proposed to her. In August 2004, the Moscow City Court gave the newly married Nasinovskaya a five-year suspended sentence on a lesser charge.

The couple divorced in November.

Lantsov, who obtained Canadian citizenship five years ago, said that these days he was focusing his attention on retrieving the ransom money and planning golf courses for the Moscow region, Vladivostok and the Black Sea resort of Anapa.

"Hopefully God will protect me, and I'll get my money and make it back to Canada before I die," he said.