Man held in Latvia has more to tell about vanishing City AM oligarch, say police

A court has ordered that his identity is not revealed to avoid jeopardising the investigation into the British-based media magnate's disappearance.

It is believed the man, who is in his 40s, was arrested because detectives suspect that he has not revealed everything he knows about Mr Rozhetskin's disappearance.

The man claimed to have seen Mr Rozhetskin leave his £1 million luxury villa in his red Porsche Cayenne 4x4 at 7.30am on the day of his disappearance.

But then he admitted that he had seen only the car and not the tycoon leaving the gated property.

Detectives have refused to comment on speculation that the arrested man is a member of Mr Rozhetskin's staff.

Mr Rozhetskin, 41, was last seen by two men who had been with him at the property in Jurmala in the early hours of Sunday, March 16.

They told police that they left the mansion at 2.30am in a taxi which dropped them off near a gay nightclub in Riga, the Latvian capital.

The investigation was launched after friends visiting for Sunday lunch could not raise Mr Rozhetskin at the villa.

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The arrested man, a Latvian, made a brief court appearance last week.

A police source said: "We do not think he is being forthcoming with everything he knows. We want to question him further."

The man's lawyer, Inese Luse, insisted her client was innocent.

She refused to disclose the nature of his friendship with Mr Rozhetskin but said he was not involved in security at his mansion.

Mr Rozhetskin's family fear he has been murdered by Moscow agents. They claim he was ready to expose corruption among the Kremlin elite.

His wife Natalya and young son have sought refuge in London, where the tycoon was a founding shareholder in the business newspaper City AM.

In another intriguing development, Latvia's interior minister, Mareks Seglins, revealed that Mr Rozhetskin possessed a fake passport – carrying a real picture of him but a false surname.

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The passport is one of between 100 and 200 that were created by corrupt Latvian officials and mostly bought in recent years by wealthy Russians seeking a European Union passport, enabling them to travel incognito and without visas.

Mr Seglins said: "It is possible he travelled on an illegal document."

Mr Rozhetskin was an American citizen and had a US passport but despite owning property in Latvia, he was not entitled to a passport from the ex-Soviet state.

A former business partner in Moscow said: "Rozhetskin had spoken for a long time about getting a Latvian passport because it would enable him to go anonymously to places where American citizens were not welcome."

Meanwhile, Russia has hit back at claims that Mr Rozhetskin had been assassinated by Moscow agents.

In a rare formal statement, Kremlin spokesman General Boris Labusov said: "Neither Foreign Intelligence nor the KGB has been participating in such operations since 1959 when Bogdan Stashinsky eliminated Stepan Bandera in Germany."

However, there have been widespread claims that Kremlin agents were behind the fatal poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006.

Mystery plane on the move again

Leonid Rozhetskin's private £9 million jet has continued its travels across Europe.

Last Saturday, The Mail on Sunday spotted the Challenger 604 in Stavanger, Norway – and two men with coats over their heads boarding just minutes before take-off. Later that day it landed at Luton Airport.

After less than two hours it took off again.

The jet then landed in the Swiss city of Geneva where it stayed until Monday when, just before 7pm, it took off having filed a flight plan to Heringsdorf, a small airport on the German-Polish border.

However, the jet diverted to Berlin Schoenefeld airport and at noon yesterday it was still on the ground there.