One of the most fantastic, at first glance, the version of the release of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, which I read in the blogosphere, is this: the German security service has trumps they have something up their sleeve" on Putin, as it was used for pressure on the President of Russia. Official information can understand that the German diplomats (and/or security services) exist and for the last 2.5 years were used some channels of communication with Vladimir Putin, inaccessible to the Americans. Rather, "still there".
You can guess what has long these connections exist, referring to the existence of the German past of Vladimir Putin. But the biography of Putin's "German in the Kremlin, Alexander Rahr I prefer the book of German journalist Jurgen Roth, "the Gangsters from the East". Immediately after the release of Khodorkovsky I asked Roth: what happened with the investigation in respect of the German-Russian company SPAG, suspected in money laundering? In 2003 Mouth, in whose hands was the intelligence report of Germany - the BND (1999) on this subject, published devoted to the SPAG book.
Managing this company with headquarters in Frankfurt am main, Liechtenstein lawyer Rudolf Ritter, according to a report by German intelligence, since 1990 he was engaged in money laundering Colombian drug mafia. Ritter was arrested, when it found millions of Swiss francs in cash, and its staff, as found Prosecutor's office, took out full of Swiss francs suitcases in Liechtenstein (suspected that they were the revenues from drug trafficking).
Company SPAG founded in 1992 himself Ritter, patterns Vladimir Smirnov and Vladimir Kumarin (Smirnov - former top-Manager of "Rosatom" and former head of the Ozero; Coumarin - 2007 sitting in prison the leader of the organized criminal Tambovskaya gang), and the Committee on Management of city property of the mayor of St. Petersburg. Until 2000 the adviser without salaries in the firm SPAG was Vladimir Putin.
http://www.svoboda.org/content/article/25208961.html