In a speech to the nation in December, Putin criticized the country’s legal system and the elements that led to accusations of wrongdoing, vowing to eliminate the factors that have turned “economic disputes into score-settling.”

Reinvest Proceeds

Putin said in a televised news conference the following week that he “hoped” the billionaires who sold their 50 percent stake in TNK-BP, Russia’s third-largest oil company, for $28 billion, would reinvest the proceeds in their home country.

“Russia was and always will be the basic platform for investment,” the billionaires -- Vekselberg, Fridman, Len Blavatnik and German Khan -- said in a joint statement released six days after Putin’s comments. A fifth partner, Alexey Kuzmichev, wasn’t part of the announcement. “In Russia, in particular, they plan to invest most of the proceeds from selling their shares in TNK-BP.”

So far, there’s been little money flowing back to Russia. Fridman and his partners at Alfa Group announced on March 18 that they would create a global investment company to pursue energy and telecommunications assets. Two weeks later, through Altimo, a unit of Alfa based in the British Virgin Islands, Fridman offered to buy out minority investors in Cairo-based Orascom Telecom Holding SAE in a deal for as much as $1.8 billion.

‘Enhance Efficiency’

Usmanov, who recently spent $100 million buying Apple Inc. shares, combined control of his assets into USM in the British Virgin Islands in December.

“The formation of a single holding company enables us to optimize business processes, enhance the efficiency of managing subsidiary companies, and provide more opportunities to access international capital markets,” he said by e-mail in February.

It also allows the billionaire and his associates, Ardavan Farhad Moshiri and Vladimir Skoch, to whom longtime Usmanov partner Andrey Skoch transferred the assets, to pay less tax and avoid the Russian legal system. Katja Ulanova, a spokeswoman for Usmanov at RLM Finsbury in London, confirmed the billionaire’s holding structures and declined to comment further.

“The Russia-Cyprus-BVI structure is the most attractive form of holding company,” Andrey Goltsblat, managing partner of Moscow-based Goltsblat BLP, the Russian practice of the international law firm Berwin Leighton Paisner, said by phone.