In London's Queen Elizabeth II conference centre there was standing room only. Some 3,000 delegates, including Russia's business elite, investors and Kremlin advisers, were packed in this week for the Russian Economic Forum, an investment showcase that should have been a chance to relaunch the case for putting money into Russia.

Two weeks earlier, Vladimir Putin, the president, had summoned the "oligarchs", the businessmen who made their fortunes in Russia's often murky privatisations of the 1990s, to the Kremlin. He told them he would change the law to make reviews of those privatisations impossible and rein in Russia's aggressive tax police. The message to domestic and international investors seemed clear: there would be no repeat of the Yukos affair, the attack by the authorities on what was previously Russia's most successful oil company and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the man who built it.