‘Russian plot’ to poison BP chief

The chief executive of BP was poisoned in a plot believed to have been orchestrated by the Russian security services, a former employee has told the Daily Telegraph.

Bob Dudley, the American boss of the British oil giant, had to flee Moscow after blood test results indicated he was being poisoned slowly, the former employee claimed.

Rumours that Dudley was poisoned began to circulate in 2014, six years after he left Russia in August 2008.

At the time, Dudley was a senior executive in BP, running a highly profitable joint venture called TNK-BP.

Ilya Zaslavskiy, who worked for TNK-BP for four and a half years, has claimed that the Russian authorities wanted to oust Dudley, so put in place a plan to slowly poison him.

Zaslavskiy believes only the FSB, the Russian intelligence agency, had the expertise to administer a toxin slowly enough to harm Dudley but stop far short of killing him.

The alleged poisoning took place two years after the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, who was exposed to radioactive polonium-210 in London, and a decade before the attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal, who was targeted with nerve agent in Salisbury.

Five years after Dudley left Moscow, TNK-BP was sold to the state-owned Rosneft. In return, BP, by then being run by Dudley, was paid a £12 billion ($23.4b) lump sum and given a 12.5 per cent stake in Rosneft.

Dudley shook hands on the deal at a ceremony in Russia, attended by Vladimir Putin, the Russian President.

Zaslavskiy said: “The whole idea was to oust Bob Dudley and about 150 Western managers.”

Zaslavskiy is now the head of research at the Free Russia Foundation, an anti-Putin thinktank in Washington, and a fellow with the Chatham House policy institute in London.