Stop the Untouchables. Justice for Sergei Magnitsky.

As Russia arrests its richest, money takes flight

International Herald Tribune

Nikolai Maksimov, one of the richest men in Russia, was sitting in a grimy jail cell in the Ural Mountains.

Through the murk, Mr. Maksimov saw his cellmate — a man, he says, who appeared ill with tuberculosis, a scourge in Russian prisons.

‘‘I had the feeling that I was put in this cell on purpose,’’ Mr. Maksimov, now free on bail, recalled recently.

Mr. Maksimov, who was arrested in February on suspicion of embezzling hundreds of millions of dollars, is hardly the only Russian tycoon who has run into trouble. Among the six men who have topped the Forbes rich list here in the last decade, one, Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, is in prison, and another, Boris A. Berezovsky, is in exile. They, like Mr. Maksimov, maintain their innocence.