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A BP employee and his brother in Moscow were convicted today of spying on state-owned giant Gazprom.
Ilya Zaslavsky works as a gas expert at the BP-TNK joint venture. He and his brother Alexander were found guilty of attempting to buy confidential information about Gazprom.
The brothers, both Oxford graduates, are prominent members of the British Alumni Club — a networking group under the patronage of the British Council for Russians who have been educated in Britain.
They were trapped after the FSB intelligence service launched an undercover operation and were arrested last year when the fight for control of the joint venture between BP and four Russian oligarchs was at its height.
Both men were given one-year suspended sentences with a two-year probationary period. Ilya is believed still to be employed by BP-TNK.
At the time of their arrest, an FSB spokesman said: “The brothers were illegally collecting classified commercial information for a number of foreign hydrocarbon companies, which wished to have an advantage over their Russian rivals.”
