Putin's enemies call for investigation into links with Stasi agent

[emad]

Telegraph
By Tom Parfitt in Moscow
(Filed: 27/02/2005)

Opponents of President Vladimir Putin are calling for an investigation into his links with a German banker who was exposed last week as a former East German spy.

Documents uncovered in a Berlin archive revealed that Matthias Warnig, 49, who played a leading role in the controversial forced sell-off of part of the Yukos oil giant, was once an agent of the East German secret police, the Stasi.

According to research by The Wall Street Journal, Mr Warnig - now the head of the Russian division of Germany's Dresdner Bank AG - co-operated with Mr Putin to recruit informers for the Soviets in Western countries when the Russian leader was serving in Dresden as a KGB colonel during the late 1980s.

Several former Stasi employees and acquaintances of the two men have confirmed their relationship. Dresdner has admitted that its employee was a spy but denied that he knew Mr Putin in Germany, saying that they met later.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/02/27/wruss27.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/02/27/ixworld.html

[Trillo]

1. Everything's just peachy between Bush and Putin.

Even though the article doesn't mention Bush, isn't the WSJ part of the corpor-gov media?

[bemildred]

2. Grabbing at straws. Yukos is toast, get used to it.

Pooty-Poot is ex-Russian intelligence. This is like "discovering"
that Ollie North knew about the Nicaraguan Contras. The Telegraph
is a Murdoch poop-sheet, is it not?