More woe for cuddly Arsenal shareholder Alisher Usmanov. The £100 million Russian version of Friends Reunited, in which Usmanov, the Lion of the Pamirs, has a 30% shareholding, is being sued in London by a British businessman.

Old Harrovian Alistair Crawford, who formed 192.com in 2000, claims the founder of the site developed it while working for him. Crawford is pursuing Odnoklassniki, claiming the company was secretly registered while the founder, Albert Popkov, worked for him in London.

Crawford's company i-CD Publishing, accuses Popkov of breaching his contract and its copyright. It is demanding the
multi-million-pound profits made by Odnoklassniki, and also wants i-CD recognised as the owner of the trademark, the internet domain name and the software.

Sources close to Crawford said: “Our objective is to simply get back our business.” Popkov said: “I did not harm anybody and didn't steal anything. The first version of the site was designed personally by me. I launched it and had been promoting the project all alone.”

Earlier this year, the Russian networking site was worth around £300 million, though because of the credit crunch that has now dropped to around £100 million. However, despite the recession, the company is expected to earn about £15 million in the coming year, with around £2 million in advertising sold for the first quarter alone.

The presence of football-loving Usmanov in the ranks of the opposition is unlikely to deter Crawford, who made headlines as a 15-year-old schoolboy on holiday from Harrow when he escaped armed kidnappers who had shot a policeman.

Crawford has now become a millionaire by making nearly four million directors' names and addresses available to the public. Accused of driving a coach and horses through the privacy of Britain's great and good, his £229 computer disc contains the names, addresses and location maps of all the 3.8 million company directors living in the UK.

* Its merger with Commerzbank may have saved Dresdner from banking oblivion, but staff in mergers and acquisitions won't be celebrating. Talk in the City is that the 101 bankers in Dresdner's London M&A department and 25 at Commerzbank will be cut down to just 25 in all. An employee at a rival bank tries to soften the anticipated blow: “Working at Dresdner is worse than unemployment.”

Peel stakes £4m on tax battle

Tough developer John Whittaker has a new enemy in his sights. A note in the latest accounts of his Peel Holdings operation indicates that HM Revenue and Customs is contesting a Peel claim for
£20.6 million capital loss relief. Another £4 million would be added in interest if Peel loses its case. Peel remains confident it will win, while conceding that the Revenue has “been successful in the High Court in challenging a case with similar facts”. Never bet against Whittaker, though. From the bitter takeover of the Manchester Ship Canal to the planning battle to build the Trafford Centre, he has shown a gritty determination never to give up and to fight to the bitter end.

Is Jo still their Valentine?

Baroness Jo Valentine, the chief executive of London First, has come out strongly in this newspaper in favour of a third runway at Heathrow. But City Spy wonders how many of the London First Heathrow Steering Committee agree with her.

Members of the committee include Ric Lewis of Curzon Global Partners, David Cheyne from Linklaters, Stephen Musgrave from Hines, Gareth Hughes of Climate Change Capital, Robert Evans from CB Richard Ellis, Rod MacDonald of Buro Happold and Russell Chambers from Credit Suisse.

In its report published last June, the committee stopped short of advocating an extra runway. Indeed City Spy understands that several members were firmly opposed…

* Nice bit of cross-promotion for the Daily Telegraph by Jeff Randall, tucking the paper he writes for under his arm in trailers for his new nightly business programme on Sky. How cross James Harding, editor of The Times, is that News International stablemate Sky is being seen to promote his deadly rival remains to be seen...

Leather boss takes a £9m tanning on
his shares

* Bad luck for Land of Leather chairman Roger Matthews. As well as being the proud owner of 307,878 Land of Leather shares, worth the best part of £9 million in 2007 and now worth, er, nothing, the former Sainsbury's finance director is also a holder of 86,882 shares in LSL Property Services, a real estate company he chairs. They were worth £232,000 in July 2007, at 267p each, and are now worth just £58,210, with the price down at 67p. That's got to hurt.

* Hmmm. Last week, it was reported that managers at some Land of Leather stores had been ordered to stop taking cash deposits from customers — a common practice in companies about to go bust. But not Land of Leather. Oh no. According to a company spokesman, the reason was that the company wanted to “avoid keeping substantial amounts of cash at its stores. Collections of cash by security companies have been disrupted by the Christmas and New Year holiday”. Just how true was that statement?

* The appointment of top criminal lawyer Vivian Robinson as general counsel to the Serious Fraud Office has been trumpeted as a coup by the SFO's new director, Richard Alderman. It is a shame that Robinson will always be a reminder of the SFO's least finest hour, when he and a clutch of other QCs secured acquittals and saw the SFO prosecution in the Blue Arrow trial fall apart...

* Robinson, it transpires is a liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Gardeners.

* Steve Lewis, chief executive of Majestic Wine, reveals that many City folks traded down in their corporate giving at Christmas. Rather than send their contacts the usual couple of bottles of Veuve Clicquot (£28.49 a bottle), they opted for a mixture of New World sauvignons or merlots (around £6 a bottle).