Moscow’s Ex-Mayor Faces Legal Scrutiny

His friends got rich, and his wife got even richer, they said, becoming a billionaire real estate magnate who controlled much of the city’s development.

Through it all, the mayor, Yuri M. Luzhkov, and his wife denied everything. Not that it seemed to matter. Mr. Luzhkov, a close ally of the Kremlin, was never investigated.

But last fall, Mr. Luzhkov fell out of favor and was fired. And suddenly, prosecutors seem to be finding corruption everywhere. They are examining a wide circle of Mr. Luzhkov’s acquaintances, family members and supporters. One by one, his allies are being arrested.

Mr. Luzhkov’s wife, Yelena N. Baturina, has been living outside Russia for months, fearing arrest. For now, Mr. Luzhkov, who is apparently still in Moscow, is defiantly refusing to leave the country, all but daring prosecutors to come after him.

The prosecutors have opened investigations into business deals dating back as many as 18 years, without explaining why they are doing so only now, after Mr. Luzhkov’s ouster. The police questioned the head of the city’s subways and the mayor’s brother-in-law.

Recently, Mr. Luzhkov and Ms. Baturina have been accused of using the city-controlled Bank of Moscow as a personal slush fund. Prosecutors say a $449 million loan intended for a real estate deal ended up in Ms. Baturina’s personal accounts in 2009.

The former mayor’s opponents have applauded the inquiries, and the authorities say they are merely bringing law and order to a city that desperately needs it. Still, the purge underscores how in Russia, political loyalty often provides protection, and law enforcement is used to settle scores.

Their opponents say Mr. Luzhkov and Ms. Baturina are well aware of how the system works, having used it to crush opponents and file lawsuits against a generation of independent journalists. Now, however, they are portraying themselves as the victims of an unfair system.

“Our society has laws that are not democratic,” Mr. Luzhkov told the opposition New Times magazine soon after his firing. Russia today, he told a theater audience in November, “has no place for the free press.”

Ms. Baturina, in a telephone interview from New York, where she said she was temporarily staying on a business trip, echoed these sentiments and expressed outrage at the investigations unfolding in Moscow.

“Instead of catching petty thieves, prosecutors are trying to investigate my money,” Ms. Baturina said. “They were looking for six months, and then they found it in my account. Why were they looking for so long? Everybody already knew all about this.”

President Dmitri A. Medvedev fired Mr. Luzhkov last fall after Mr. Luzhkov published an article critical of Mr. Medvedev in a government newspaper. That amounted to publicly criticizing his boss, in that the mayors of St. Petersburg and Moscow have been appointed by the president since 2004, rather than elected.

That action seemed to call into question Mr. Luzhkov’s loyalty to what is known as the ruling tandem of Mr. Medvedev and his prime minister, Vladimir V. Putin, considered by many the more powerful of the two.

Soon enough, one Luzhkov loyalist after another was arrested or driven into exile or switched sides, as the details of corrupt deals that many people already knew about bubbled to the surface. The Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor General’s Office denied a political motivation, issuing a statement saying it had intended to investigate corruption in Moscow earlier, even before Mr. Luzhkov’s firing.

One bureaucrat was accused of holding patents on machines used in the subway system, so that a portion of the city construction contracts he signed circled back to him as royalties, prosecutors said.

Investigators say that the scheme began in 1999, but that they noticed it only recently.

Prosecutors re-examined the collapse of a roof over a children’s swimming pool in 2004, which killed 28 people. This time around they noticed that the building could have been owned by Ms. Baturina, who may have received waivers from building codes.

Prosecutors examined one land deal dating from 1993, soon after Mr. Luzhkov took office.