Mr Vladimir Gusinsky had battled for months to retain his gripon his Media-Most group, which owns Russia's only nationwide independent television network, NTV, from what he has described as a Kremlin plot to stifle critics.

Natural gas behemoth Gazprom said that in exchange for writing off $211 million in debt, it had displaced Mr Gusinsky as the largest voting shareholder in NTV and won a blocking stake in Media-Most's other subsidiaries.

Both Gazprom and Media-Most said the deal was structured so no single shareholder would have control over NTV.

Gazprom Media Chief Alfred Kokh told a news conference the deal was a purely business transaction, but the long-running Media-Most debt saga has mushroomed into a row over free speech.

President Vladimir Putin won office in March vowing that "oligarchs," powerful businessmen who used their vast wealth to call favours under former President Boris Yeltsin, would disappear as a class under his rule.

Media barons cry foul
While it has been business as usual for many industrialists, media barons like Mr Gusinsky and Boris Berezovsky who have fallen out of favour with the Kremlin, have cried foul as federal prosecutors probed their businesses.

Both Mr Gusinsky and Mr Berezovsky have fled abroad and refused to return this week to answer prosecutors' questions, saying they feared arrest in fraud and asset-stripping cases.

An arch Kremlin insider in the Yeltsin era, Mr Berezovsky has fallen out of favour with the new administration and used his broad media interests to launch an increasingly strident campaign against Putin.

Mr Berezovsky has accused Kremlin aides of threatening him with jail unless he relinquished a 49 percent stake he controls in ORT, the most-watched television station in Russia.

"I offered a concrete plan to save Russia, to set up a constructive Opposition. The authorities answered with the threat of arrest," Mr Berezovsky told a television talkshow on NTV via live satellite link from Washington.

Mr Putin returned to Russia on Friday from an Asian regional summit where he touted free-market reforms. In Siberia on Friday, he said he wanted to liberalise electricity prices.

Prosecutors added to Mr Gusinsky's woes on Friday, reopening a case against the millionaire former theatre manager that they had dropped in the summer after jailing him for three days.

Mr Gusinsky said the case was politically-motivated and aimed to force him to sign away his print and broadcast empire.

An earlier agreement he signed selling out to Gazprom was co-signed by Media Minister Mikhail Lesin, which Mr Gusinsky said proved that the Kremlin was using Media-Most's debt woes to force him to give up his company.

Lesin publicly rebuked
The row forced the Kremlin to deny any role and won Lesin a public dressing-down by Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov for getting the government embroiled in a commercial dispute.

Allegations of Kremlin dirty-tricks had persisted after Mr Kokh earlier this week unexpectedly pulled out of a similar deal that would have ended a Gazprom lawsuit against Media-Most. The fate of that court action remained unclear on Friday.

"We are trying to separate the two issues, the process which is being conducted by the general prosecutor against Mr Gusinsky, and the process of settling Media-Most's debt to Gazprom," Mr Kokh told reporters.

Mr Kokh said Gazprom would hold a total of 50 per cent plus one share of all Media-Most's companies except NTV, and 65 percent of the television station.

But that includes 19 per cent of NTV and 25 per cent of the other companies held as collateral for debt. Gazprom cannot vote those shares and would therefore not directly control the firms.

Mr Kokh said Gazprom and Media-Most would try to sell a 25 per cent blocking stake of NTV to a foreign investor through Germany's Deutsche Bank for at least $90 million.

Reuters