Hitman Kills Putin's Ex-bankruptcy Boss

A leading business figure has been assassinated on a busy street in central Moscow, the second such victim of a contract hit in a fortnight.

Georgy Tal, 48, who once headed the government's controversial bankruptcy agency, was shot outside his office on Wednesday morning.

A gunman approached from behind and shot him in the back. Mr Tal spun around, and blocked two further shots with his briefcase, before a fourth hit him in the stomach. The gunman fled in a car. Mr Tal died yesterday in hospital.

Police would not comment on possible motives for the killing. Mr Tal worked in one of the dirtiest and most corrupt fields of financial legislation, doubtlessly amassing enemies. Two years ago he and his wife were beaten with iron bars, according to media reports.

"Tal was not the sort who stole or took bribes," Arkady Volsky, head of the Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, told the Kommersant newspaper, but his killing "was some kind of revenge". Despite the Kremlin's attempts to portray Moscow as a lawful hub for international business, killings that blighted its image in the 1990s continue.

On April 14, Boris Goldman, an advertising executive, was killed by a motorcyclist who pulled alongside his armoured Volvo C80 and placed a bomb on its roof - the only spot where the armour was thin enough to be penetrated.

The bomb detonated immediately, killing the car's four occupants and the motorcyclist, leading investigators to believe he had been double-crossed. In a previous assassination by the same method, police arrested those responsible because the hitman was caught alive after the blast and named his employers.

Governors, MPs, and senior officials have also been killed in daytime attacks in the past year, yet few arrests have been made. Last week officials said they knew "all" those responsible for gunning down the governor of the eastern Magadan region, Valentin Tsvetkov, in front of his wife in Moscow in 2002, but the prosecutor said they now faced the task of finding them.

From 1994 to 1997, Tal was a senior official in the department that organised the privatisations whereby a few businessmen bought up state assets for next to nothing. The Kremlin, while insisting that it does not want to revise the outcome of the privatisations, has ordered its tax watchdog to conduct a review.

In 1998, Tal became head of the federal bankruptcy service and drew up hugely controversial powers over businesses in debt. A firm could be declared bankrupt if it owed as little as $2,000 for three months. This law resulted in bankruptcies rocketing to 150,000 a year. Tal left in 2001, and was working for a bankruptcy advice firm.

Yesterday the newspaper Gazeta named seven "crisis directors", appointed to oversee a company declared bankrupt, who had been murdered since 1999.