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But the dapper Englishman volunteered his services.

It was an ambitious – and risky – undertaking in the fraught and suspicious atmosphere at that time. In the vacuum, one man stepped out of the shadows and offered to fill Curtis’ shoes. Who would run the beleaguered Yukos oil empire? Khodorkovsky had been arrested at gunpoint and thrown in jail a few months earlier, and now Curtis had just fallen out of the sky. “The timing could not have been worse for the company,” lawyer for Yukos shareholders Robert Amsterdam told Channel 4 News in 2004.Ĭurtis understood Yukos’ elaborate offshore structures and was said to keep a lot of the information in his head as Yukos tried to stay one step ahead of the Russian government. The morning after his death, Swiss police raided Yukos-related entities in the country $5bn in assets was frozen. Days before his fatal flight from a London heliport, he had met an agency handler. In a twist that would emerge in the weeks after his death, Curtis had approached the National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS) – the British police-intelligence liaison agency – and offered to serve as an informant. Powerful adversaries locked in a battle of wills. But it was more than that: it was about the political threat posed by Yukos’ chief, oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, to spymaster-turned-President Vladimir Putin. Yukos was in conflict with the Russian government, allegedly over unpaid taxes. He was an obscure English lawyer with a remarkable job, running Menatep, a company that controlled Russia’s biggest oil company, Yukos. A message was left on his phone: “Curtis, where are you? We are here. His bodyguards found a bug at his house, according to reports. Private investigators told him his telephones were tapped. The pilot and his single passenger – lawyer Stephen Curtis – had died in the flames after the helicopter nose-dived into the field, according to air accident investigators.Ĭurtis had faced threats in the weeks before the crash. You could see flames all over the meadow below.” “Then, I saw a white flash in the sky,” Kenchington said. “The helicopter flew very low and drowned out the TV,” he later said. Nick Kenchington started at the roar of rotor blades above his cottage, fearing the helicopter would “take the roof off”. Who was this man? And how deep did his business connections go? A helicopter falls from the skyĪt 7:41pm (18:41 GMT) on a spring evening in 2004, an Agusta 109E helicopter cratered into a field in rural Dorset, southern England, two tonnes of steel, wiring and fuel exploding into a fireball. Until undercover reporters from Al Jazeera’s I-Unit caught him on secret camera agreeing to sell an English football club to a convicted Chinese criminal, in breach of football regulations. Even as his clients mysteriously died, one by one, he managed to stay in the shadows and remain ahead of the game. He had glittering success – a long career managing one of the world’s biggest trust companies and making millions from Russia’s oligarchs.