Mr Abramovich, the owner of Chelsea Football Club, is widely believed to have close ties to the Kremlin. At its request, he agreed last year to serve a second term as governor of the remote Arctic region of Chukotka.

Separately, Mikhail Gorbachev, the former leader of the Soviet Union, announced that he and a business partner had bought a significant share in another newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, to try to preserve its independence.

The two reported deals threw an uncomfortable spotlight on media freedom in Russia on the final day of a conference of world newspaper editors in Moscow. On Monday President Putin told the opening session of the World Newspaper Congress that Russia enjoyed freedom of the press and that the state was reducing its involvement in the sector.

But critics say that the state has indirect control over most of the important news publications and direct ownership of all the national television networks and radio stations.

Gazprom, the state-run gas monopoly, bought Izvestia, a leading daily newspaper, last year, and most of the others are owned by businessmen loyal to the Kremlin.

One notable exception is Kommersant, which has regularly published scandals and scoops that have reflected badly on the authorities, and it has faced a series of lawsuits as a result.

Media experts say that the Kommersant deal would signal the end of its days as the most aggressively independent news outlet in the country.

Abramovich is one of the oligarchs, known in Russia as “wallets”. “If a ‘wallet’ buys something, that means the authorities need it,” Aleksei Simonov, the head of the Glasnost Defence Foundation, a press freedom watchdog, said. “From my point of view, this will do nothing good for media freedom in Russia.”

The business daily, which has a readership of about 100,000, was owned until recently by Boris Berezovsky, the exiled tycoon, who was granted political asylum in Britain in 2003.

But he sold his share to Badri Patarkatsishvili, his Georgian business partner, in February to try to save the paper from Kremlin pressure.

Mr Patarkatsishvili is said to have sold it on to Mr Abramovich’s investment company, Millhouse, for $120 million (£65 million), according to Ekho Moskvy, an independent radio station.

Pavel Filenkov, the commercial director of Kommersant, denied that the paper had been sold, but he told The Times that there had been discussions about such a deal.

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