The Georgian billionaire Arkadi "Badri" Patarkatsishvili, who has died, apparently of a heart attack aged 52, was one of that school of tycoons who grew rich though grit and opportunism in the wake of the breakup of the Soviet Union. At his death he was said to be worth £6bn.
Patarkatsishvili was, indeed, one of the true oligarchs of his times, combining business sleight of hand with political clout. He was also a close associate of Boris Berezovsky, the former mathematician who became the grey cardinal in the Kremlin during the 1990s.
A flamboyant figure with a distinctive white handlebar moustache, Patarkatsishvili built up a business empire that at various times included stakes in the LogoVAZ car dealership, Russia's influential Kommersant newspaper and the Sibneft oil company, later controlled by Roman Abramovich, the owner of Chelsea football club.
Forced to flee Russia in 2001 under threat of prosecution for fraud and then hounded out of his native Georgia last year, Patarkatsishvili joined the burgeoning group of wealthy exiles in London. From there, he sniped at his tormentors in Moscow and Tbilisi, the Georgian capital.
His struggle had become overtly political in 2006 when he turned against his former ally, the Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili, accusing him of leading a march towards corruption. Three years earlier, as the US-educated lawyer prepared to seize the presidency, Patarkatsishvili had positioned himself as a supporter. Now accusations of assassination plots and coup conspiracies began to fly between the two sides, as Patarkatsishvili started funding the political opposition to Saakashvili and then ran against him, without entering the country, for the presidency. "Georgia without Saakashvili," he proclaimed, "is a Georgia without terror." On January 5 2008, he took 7% of the vote. Saakashvili took 52%.
Two months before his death Patarkatsishvili handed newspapers a recording he had obtained in which a Georgian official and a Chechen warlord allegedly discussed his murder, along with his retinue of bodyguards. He was convinced that Saakashvili's allies would try to kill him.
Despite the initial post-mortem tests, which indicate that he died from natural causes, suspicions of foul play are likely to linger. The Georgian authorities have countered that the assassination claim was a "provocation" and earlier released their own cassette in which Patarkatsishvili was said to be plotting to overthrow the government.
Born into a Jewish family of the intelligentsia in Tbilisi, the capital of what was then the Soviet Socialist Republic of Georgia, Patarkatsishvili was forced as a schoolboy to fend off taunts about his name, meaning "son of a little man". However, he showed an enterprising streak, getting into the car repairs business as a teenager. Like other future oligarchs such as Mikhail Khodorkovsky, he used the Soviet communist youth organisation, the Komsomol, as a means of establishing high-level contacts.
His further education was at the Georgian Polytechnical Institute, and Patarkatsishvili then moved rapidly through senior positions in the Soviet-Georgia textile factory, becoming deputy director in the 1980s as Mikhail Gorbachev was attempting to reform the Soviet Union. In August 1991, in the wake of the abortive coup, the system collapsed, and Boris Yeltsin came to power in the new, independent Russia.
Having begun to work for Berez-ovsky's LogoVAZ, in the Caucasus, Patarkatsishvili moved to Moscow in 1993. There he became deputy director general of the company. It was a private dealership which sold the workhorse "Soviet Fiat", the Lada saloon car, and later traded commodities, both with spectacular success.
Both men would become fabulously wealthy and their friendship continued until the last day of Patarkatsishvili's life. From LogoVAZ, he was propelled to Berezovsky's ORT television station, occupying a number of senior positons including acting director. "Badri," said one former employee of the channel, "was the one who controlled the money".
As big business infiltrated the Kremlin, Patarkatsishvili, who was also chairing the AKB United Bank, became one of the cheerleaders for a young former director of the FSB - the successor to the KGB - by the name of Vladimir Putin. As far as the Georgian was concerned, Putin's rapid rise through senior positions to become prime minister under Yeltsin, and then president, was the result of Patarkatsishvili's lobbying.
But one of his problems was that he underestimated Putin's fervour for removing those Yeltsin-era businessmen from the corridors of power once he had taken the presidency in 2000. Patarkatsishvili got on the wrong side of the Kremlin when he and another ORT employee, Andrei Lugovoi, allegedly organised the springing of one of Berezovsky's business associates, Nikolai Glushkov, from jail.
Lugovoi - who would later became well known in Britain amid allegations that he was the killer of the former KGB operative, Alexander Litvinenko - spent 14 months in jail for the escape. Feeling the heat, it was then that Patarkatsishvili fled to Georgia. Around this time, Russian prosecutors also laid fraud charges against him over dealings involving a subsidiary of LogoVAZ.
Back in Tbilisi, Patarkatsishvili was initially supportive of Saakashvili, a young reformer who seized the presidency in the aftermath of the "Rose revolution" in 2003. The tycoon's fortune helped paper over some cracks in the desperately poor state. Soon, however, the two men fell out, with Patarkatsishvili accusing the government of "outrageous legal violations and terror".
He threw his money behind opposition forces, and was a driving force in mass protests against Saakashvili last autumn, which were broken up by security forces. His television company, Imedi, became a mouthpiece for the president's critics.
Earlier in the year, the country's defence minister claimed that Saakashvili had suggested assassinating Patarkatsishvili. In December Patarkatsishvili moved to London, saying he feared for his safety as the Chechen hitman plot emerged. Then came the abortive presidential bid. He is survived by his wife and two daughters.
· Arkadi "Badri" Patarkatsishvili, Georgian businessman, born October 31 1955; died February 12 2008