Lebedev moves closer to buying the Independent

Russian tycoon Alexander Lebedev is one step closer to buying the Independent newspaper today after the Office of Fair Trading gave him the green light. Lebedev also owns 75 per cent of London's Evening Standard, but the OFT said the company resulting from his takeover of Independent News & Media (INM) would not be large enough to require investigation on competition issues.

The ruling means there is very little to prevent Lebedev from adding the Independent to his media empire, and it is thought a deal could be announced as soon as Sunday this week. A takeover of INM will also hand the billionaire the Independent on Sunday.

Rumours are flying about who the former KGB agent will bring in to edit the papers. His wish list has been variously said to include Spectator columnist Rod Liddle, Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman, former BBC director general Greg Dyke and Private Eye editor Ian Hislop. The new owner could also spell a renaissance for the loss-making Indy - he has already pledged a £30m investment to the Evening Standard over three years and promised no editorial interference.

And Lebedev's credentials as a defender of the freedom of the press are impressive. With his mentor Mikhail Gorbachev, he owns 49 per cent of Novaya Gazeta, the Putin-baiting, Kremlin-challenging newspaper which has seen four of its journalists murdered in the last eight years – most infamously, Anna Politkovskaya.

Lebedev has an unsurprisingly staunch supporter in Geordie Greig, the former Tatler chief whom he installed as editor of the Standard. Greig told the Times: "On the day he bought the Standard, he couldn't be there because he was at the funeral in Russia of two journalists and a lawyer who had been murdered. So no one should question his seriousness in promoting press freedom.

"He's incredibly polite and intensely curious - the sort of person who pursues visions. He believes passionately that there should be as much democratic freedom as possible through elections. But he's no blind crusader: he says a lot of things should be made better in Russia, but that a lot of things are much better."

But there is another side to Lebedev, as the UK documentary maker Lottie Gammon discovered in Moscow in 2008 making her film The Moscow Correspondence. She was filming in the offices of another of Lebedev's Russian titles, Moskovsky Korrespondent, when he abruptly closed the paper, making the entire staff jobless.

Earlier that year, according to a later story in the Times, the paper had "reported an unsubstantiated rumour that Putin had secretly divorced his wife, Ludmilla, and was planning to marry an Olympic rhythmic gymnast half his age". The official reason for the closure was distribution problems.

Gammon filmed Lebedev's staff on the paper being asked to sign documents saying they had chosen to leave of their own free will, and would receive no compensation. The staff told her that if they did not sign, they would not have their 'workbooks' returned - and without a workbook it would be impossible to get another job.

One journalist, Anton Raznakhnin, told Gammon: "No-one from top management or even Lebedev himself explained to us. Nobody appeared. It's not human, as we say in Russia. It's not the way things should be done."

If he is not motivated by the defence of journalists, what could be the reason for Lebedev's interest in the UK press? Last year the Guardian quoted a "close associate" of Lebedev as saying: "Putin is always telling the oligarchs they should go and invest in the West... Lebedev wants to prove to Putin that he can control parts of the Western media, in order to project a better image of Russia. He has said to me many times that this is his motive." ·