Twenty-two years ago, Mikhail Fridman could be found wandering the streets of Moscow offering to wash windows. Legend has it that if you said your windows weren’t dirty when the young Ukrainian student first visited, they often were by the time he came round to ask a second time.

Now, after rising to become one of the world’s richest men with a fortune estimated at between $12 billion and $17 billion (£6-8.5 billion), Fridman is leading a group of four oligarchs who are using strong-arm tactics with oil giant BP over its lucrative Russian business.

The joint venture TNK-BP accounts for about a quarter of BP’s global oil reserves. ... Read full article