The gavel will come down on Friday on the last asset belonging to former Russian oil giant Yukos, symbolically ending the company’s existence after a tortuous four-year legal battle with the Kremlin. In a bankruptcy auction, the shiny Moscow skyscraper built by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Yukos’s jailed founder, will be sold in a final victory for Vladimir Putin’s increasingly autocratic presidency.

“This is the last rites,” says one western insider who once advised Mr Khodorkovsky. “It was inevitable once they attacked that the Kremlin would not stop until they got the lot.”