Stephen Curtis

Stephen Curtis; 7 August 1958, Sunderland - 3 March 2004, Bournemouth) was a British lawyer who was involved in the establishment of Russian oligarchic business structures in the 1990s.
Biography
He was born in Sunderland to an accountant. Graduated from the University of Aberystwyth. In the 1980s he worked for the law firm Fox and Gibbons. He worked with clients from the Persian Gulf countries.
In the 1990s he founded his own law firm, Curtis & Co, specializing in commercial affairs.

Since 1997 he has worked with the group Menatep. Curtis helped organize the structure of offshore companies affiliated with Yukos.
Hundreds of millions of oil profits were withdrawn from Russia through offshore accounts in Gibraltar, the Cayman Islands and the Isle of Man.
How important a person he was to Yukos, it became known from the documents shown by the Channel-4. In 1999, for example, he thus organized Yukos offshore oil trading structures that they were 
not formally owned by the company and could not be taxed by the Russian state.
Curtis acquired a significant fortune allowing him to buy a penthouse in London, a 19th century castle in Dorset, a private jet and a helicopter.
Curtis represented Boris Berezovsky and former deputy CEO of Aeroflot Nicholas Glushkov in the Supreme Court of Great Britain at a hearing on their claim against the American publishing house Forbes.
When Boris Berezovsky 2003 detained in London at the request of the Russian Prosecutor 's Office in March 2016, Curtis paid half of the cash bail for Berezovsky (bail was £160,000). Lord Timothy Bell made the other half of the pledge.
On November 14, 2003, following Platon Lebedev 's arrest, Curtis became managing director of the Menatep group.
Curtis feared for his life; In particular, he was threatened with death by telephone.
According to the Times, Curtis collected kompromat on Putin and 11 other Russians. The aim was "to discredit Putin and his entourage."
He died in a plane crash on March 3, 2004. His private Agusta 109 helicopter crashed near Bournemouth Airport off the coast of the English Channel.
A study of the wreckage of the helicopter shed little light on the causes of the disaster, and in November 2005, a grand investigative jury concluded that Curtis 's death was the result of an accident.