Legally they had no case really, but I can hardly afford to fight high-priced London lawyers with no means myself. That’s their strategy and why they went after bloggers and the webhosts rather than Murray himself, who wanted to go to court. That law firm is particularly well known for such aggressive and underhand tactics.

“Thomas Wise (IND/DEM). – Madam President, when the EU talks of a common foreign policy on energy, you need to be very aware of exactly who you propose to do business with. President Putin is on record as saying ‘The Commission should be under no illusions. If it wants to buy Russian gas, it has to deal with the Russian state.’

“Gazprom is not a private company. It is a state-controlled tool of Russian foreign policy. It is, moreover, in the hands of President Putin’s political henchmen and, allegedly, organised crime. Take, for example, Alisher Usmanov. This gentleman, the son of a Communist apparatchik, is Chairman of Gazprom Invest Holdings, the group that handles Gazprom’s business activities outside Russia. He is the man we are doing business with. He is the man who cuts off gas supplies if client states dare to question Gazprom’s demands. Allegedly a gangster and racketeer, he served a six-year jail sentence in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, his eventual pardon coming at the behest of Uzbek mafia chief and heroin overlord Gafur Rakhimov, described as Usmanov’s mentor.

“Usmanov bought the newspaper Kommersant. Three months later the journalist Ivan Safronov, a critic of the Putin regime who just weeks earlier had been vigorously interrogated by the FSB, as the KGB is now called, mysteriously fell to his death from his apartment window, still clutching a recently purchased bag of shopping.

“According to Craig Murray, the former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, it was Usmanov who ordered the cutting off of supplies to Georgia earlier this year. Please take note, Madam President, the Kremlin has now refused to sanction the construction of a pipeline to the EU over Georgian territory. These are the people you want to do business with. These are the people around whom you want to mould your foreign policy on energy. Commissioner, good luck. You will need it.”

When the news broke about Usmanov’s interest in Arsenal, former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray revealed on his website Usmanov’s past, including his six year stretch in prison. It’s still legally difficult to repeat his allegations here as I don’t want to deal with Usmanov’s hounds, Schillings, again.

You see, when bloggers such as myself linked to and repeated Murray’s claims, Usmanov threatened to sue us. He eventually forced Murray’s website offline by threatening to sue his webhost. Usmanov refused to challenge Murray directly himself, despite the latter actually calling Schillings and inviting them to take him to court. Unfortunately for Usmanov, his lawyers managed to get the webhost to pull the plug on a number of other prominent websites as collateral damage, including that of Mayoral candidate Boris Johnson.

This led to a huge media storm and debate about free speech. Schillings were essentially trying to bully bloggers without the resources to fight legally to remove the information from the internet without actually challenging the information by suing Murray.

Murray’s original article on Usmanov, essential reading for the answer to your question, is available here.

What is in Usmanov’s past and why was he in prison? Surely he must be better than the former Thai dicator over at ManCity.

I haven’t read the Arsenal Memorandum and Articles of Association (I do have standards, you know), but the standard provision in English law Articles is for extraordinary resolutions such as those Dave outlines (also things like change of purpose, merger, winding up, etc.) to require the approval of 75% of the shareholders. The purpose of those provisions is to protect minority shareholders from being oppressed by the majority, but in this case they would operate to give Usmanov a veto over a series of defensive measures that the Arsenal board might want to implement (and we all know how much they like defence (sorry the League Cup Final run-up has my Tottenham juices flowing).

The Board is right that a takeover is impractical as long as the lockdown holds, but it seems to me that Usmanov is doing is pursuing a strategy that will allow him to pounce as soon as there are any fissures in the resolve of the Board group, while at the same time increasing the value to the Board of ultimately buying him out at a premium in order to be rid of the noxious Uzbek (a well-established strategy we call “greenmail”).

BTW, one legalistic point of clarification. He doesn’t need 30 percent to launch a takeover bid; he could do that today. Instead, he would be required to launch a bid were he to reach that level.

but is it all so surprising? if you are a company, you can be bought.