MOSCOW — A prominent and well-connected economist who has openly supported opposition figures has resigned from several posts and abruptly left Russia under mounting pressure from investigators, officials of the university he leads said on Wednesday.
The economist, Sergei Guriev, has been questioned repeatedly in a case that stems from a report that he co-wrote that harshly criticized the treatment of Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, the imprisoned oil tycoon and one-time political rival to President Vladimir V. Putin.
A centrist figure who is at home among Russia’s power brokers, Mr. Guriev drew attention a year ago for publicly declaring his support for the anti-corruption blogger Aleksei Navalny.
“Am I not afraid to support an opposition politician?” he wrote at the time, adding that he and his wife had contributed a small amount to a fund to support Mr. Navalny’s anti-corruption effort. “No. I am a free person. I know that as long as I haven’t violated the law, no one can forbid me to say something or do something. Might I be misled? Of course.”
Mr. Guriev declined to comment on the reasons for his departure on Wednesday, and has said he left for a vacation in France, where his wife and children live. However, two close associates said he had left because he was unsettled by intensifying interest from investigators.
“He had reason to believe he could be deprived of his freedom,” and possibly prevented from leaving Russia, said one friend, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about the case.
“He had visits from people. After those visits, he asked a number of influential people in Moscow who normally would protect him, and he was given advice that he was not safe,” the friend said. “He left in a hurry. We’re talking about a few days.”
Dmitri S. Peskov, a spokesman for Mr. Putin, said that as far as he knew, Mr. Guriev had simply left Russia on vacation, and that he could not comment on the investigation.
“This is not our question — this has nothing to do with the Kremlin, nothing to do with the president,” he said. “The only thing I can tell you is that this is pure speculation. I have found only his words saying he had personal reasons to resign, and he has not left Moscow.”
However, if Mr. Guriev has left Russia because of a politically tinged prosecution, it is likely to make waves both in Russia and the West, because he is so well known. When President Obama visited Russia in 2009, he delivered an address at the New Economic School, where Mr. Guriev has served as rector for 10 years. Mr. Guriev wrote speeches for Mr. Medvedev when he was president, and was seen as closely affiliated with his government.
Aleksei V. Makarkin, an analyst at Moscow’s Center for Political Technologies, said the pressure on Mr. Guriev shows that law enforcement organs are increasingly confident in their moves against supporters of the political opposition, even if it comes at the cost of international prestige.
He noted investigators’ recent scrutiny into whether Skolkovo, the government-financed innovation hub pioneered by Prime Minister Dmitri A. Medvedev, had funneled money to opposition politicians.
“Probably the siloviki have gotten carte blanche to carry out actions on people regardless of their standing,” he said, referring to the investigators. “There was some kind of an informal manifesto which does not exist now.”
Mr. Guriev is one of a panel of experts who agreed to co-write a highly critical 2011 report on the Khodorkovsky verdict under the auspices of Mr. Medvedev’s human rights council. After Mr. Putin became president last spring, investigators opened an inquiry into whether Mr. Khodorkovsky had secretly paid the report’s authors.
Another of the authors, Mikhail Subbotin, who heads the Center for Legal and Economic Research, said investigators had carried out numerous searches of the homes of his organization’s founders and co-workers, going so far as to search the home of one woman’s husband in Kazakhstan. He said they were searching for evidence that Yukos, the giant oil company Mr. Khodorkovsky headed, had given money to the organization in 2003, eight years before the report was published.
Economist Sergei Guriev Leaves Russia Abruptly
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