Body of missing City AM tycoon ‘is found in remote woodland’
THE mystery of a Russian-born British media magnate who disappeared four years ago amid fears he was the victim of a KGB plot may finally have been solved after the discovery of a body.
Police in Latvia believe they have found the corpse of Leonid Rozhetskin, a jet-setting filmmaker and co-founder of the free London business newspaper City AM, hidden in a remote forest.
The flamboyant lawyer vanished in March 2008 from his blood-stained £1 million holiday villa in the Baltic Sea resort of Jurmala. At the time he was
‘There was a credit card on the body’
embroiled in a business dispute with an associate of President Vladimir Putin.
Mr Rozhetskin is thought to have angered Leonid Reiman during a £130 million deal involving a mobile phone company in which Mr Reiman was alleged to have had financial interests.
Legal action was threatened and the previously extrovert Mr Rozhetskin became reclusive and surrounded himself with bodyguards before fleeing abroad.
Mr Reiman has vehemently denied any wrongdoing.
Yesterday Mr Rozhetskin’s New Yorkbased mother Elvira, 72, told how she received a mysterious phone call from a Russian-speaking man who said a body had been discovered. ‘He said that a man had been found in the forest near Tukums in Latvia and there was a credit card on the body with my son’s name on it.’
When her son went missing, she claimed he had been murdered because he was committed to exposing corruption in Mr Putin’s government. Mrs Rozhetskin told The Mail on Sunday at the time: ‘My son isn’t missing. My son is dead.’
Police in Riga confirmed last week that they had found a body along with a credit card belonging to the tycoon.
The badly decomposed remains are currently undergoing DNA and forensic tests and results should be known this week, but a senior police source close to the four-year investigation said: ‘It is very likely that the body is Leonid Rozhetskin’s.’