to support Kremlin friendly operations and companies. In April 1999, then FSB Chief Vladimir Putin and Interior Minister Sergei Stepashin held a televised press conference in which they discussed a video that both Mikhail Shvydkoy and Mikhail Lesin agreed to release and that had aired nationwide on 17 March on the state-controlled RTR channel which showed a naked man very similar to Skuratov, in bed with two young women. This video was released after he had been investigating numerous corrupt officials including Alexander Mamut and both Pavel Borodin and Vladimir Putin and had begun looking into charges of corruption by President Boris Yeltsin and his associates: the video was said to serve as kompromat. Skuratov's dismissal occurred just days before a second search of the owner of Mabetex the Albanian businessman Behgjet Pacolli linked interests during an ongoing money laundering investigation which had begun in 1992 in Bern involving Pacolli and Yakutiya () officials involved in gold and diamonds especially the Mayor of Yakutsk Pavel Pavlovich Borodin who was Putin's architect for the transfer of the Presidential Property Management Department assets to LLCs, JSCs, and Joint Ventures during early 1997. In early 2000, Filipe Turover sent messages from his Swiss residence to Moscow prosecutors "I'm ready to talk about Putin. Always your Turover." The Russian prosecutor Ruslan Tamaev () headed the Russian investigations into Mabetex which ended when his half brothers Hasan and Hussein were charged with illegal possession of drugs and weapons and he was subsequently removed from investigations. A few months later the charges against his half brothers were dropped. In April 2000, Skuratov was fired as chief prosecutor after serving a suspension for accusing top officials of corruption. 2000 presidential campaign In 2000, Skuratov ran in the Russian presidential elections. Skuratov's campaign largely ran advertisements intended to remediate the damage inflicted to his reputation by the video which had been released in 1999. These ads portrayed him as a decent family man and a faithful husband who had been the victim of "lies" and "fabrications". In the limited coverage he was allotted, Russian media treated him as a sideshow rather than as a serious contender for the presidency. Notes References Books External links Persons – NUPI, biography from the Norwegian Centre for Russian Studies Yury Skuratov, The Moscow Times, 22 March 2000. 1952 births Living people People from Ulan-Ude Communist Party of the Russian Federation members Candidates