WHEN Alisher Usmanov was sent to an Uzbek penal colony stuffed with 3,500 inmates, including murderers and rapists, he came face to face with two dozen hardened criminals who had been prosecuted by his father. Few thought he would get out alive.

“When they realised that my dad was Uzbekistan’s deputy prosecutor-general they wanted to rip me to shreds,” Usmanov recalled last week in his first full interview since he bought a £120m stake in Arsenal football club.

“My life was in serious danger and I was shocked at what had happened to me. After a privileged upbringing I suddenly found myself in a tuberculosis-infested maximum security penal colony. Conditions were appalling and I had to survive day by day. But in time the inmates learnt to respect me and I managed to stay true to myself. I stayed alive and remained an honest person.”

Usmanov was 33 when he was released, six years into an eight-year sentence for fraud and embezzlement, in 1986. The convictions were later overturned by Uzbekistan’s Supreme Court, which ordered his police record to be expunged.

Little more than 20 years after he was freed, he has amassed an estimated £5 billion fortune and is ranked 18th in the list of Russia’s richest.

He runs a metals to media business empire that spans three continents. There are properties in Moscow, Surrey and Sardinia and a “mega-yacht” with its own helipad.

As a senior adviser to Gazprom, the world’s biggest extractor of natural gas, and the president of one of its subsidiaries, Usmanov also maintains regular contact with influential figures in the Russian government.

He is on good personal terms with President Vladimir Putin and is often summoned to the Kremlin by officials seeking his opinion.

Unlike some Russian tycoons who dabbled in politics, angered Putin and ended up in exile or in jail, Usmanov has stuck to business. He describes Putin as a “blessing for Russia” and spends £20m a year supporting Russian sport and culture, including the Bolshoi ballet.

Last month he bought the entire art collection of the late cellist Mstislav Rostropovich for a reported £30m to stop it being broken up and sold abroad. The 450 works were donated to the Russian state.

Now 53, Usmanov appears to have led a charmed existence since he was released from detention. But he remains haunted by his years of incarceration on the outskirts of Tashkent, the Uzbek capital.

Although he was fully absolved in 2000 and no longer has a criminal record, rumours about his past persist. Usmanov believes they are promulgated by business rivals and feels wronged by his portrayal in Britain since he bought 23% of Arsenal during the summer.

Craig Murray, the outspoken former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, has accused Usmanov of links with organised crime but has offered no proof. Usmanov rejected the charges and threatened to sue Murray “if he can first prove that he is completely sane”.

It was partly in an attempt to curb claims of a shady past that he invited me to his Moscow mansion and agreed to talk for the first time about the circumstances that led to his being imprisoned in 1980.

“I was jailed on trumped-up charges and lost six years of my life as a result of infighting within the KGB,” he said. “It took another 14 years to clear my name and prove that I was framed. All my career I’ve been confronted with prejudiced people who are determined to turn me into a stereotype, a central Asian thief.

“I’m fed up with having to answer these slurs. Not only did I never do anything criminal but I managed to stay honest and become one of the world’s most successful businessmen, despite being locked up with criminals for six years. It’s high time that those who continue to insinuate things about me recognised that.”

Usmanov runs his empire from the headquarters of Metal-loinvest, his main company, in a lavish building in central Moscow fitted with Italian marble and heavy chandeliers. From there I was driven 30 miles along Rublovka, a road that cuts through a forest of firs to a “billionaires’ row” where Usmanov has a 30-acre estate beside the Moscow river. A 16ft-high metal fence encircles the property.

Usmanov, who never leaves home without a retinue of bodyguards armed with machine-guns, was working in a large, single-storey wooden villa which he has built as a private office next to his palatial house.

Casually dressed in a Lacoste polo shirt, tracksuit bottoms and leather slippers, he was sitting in an armchair, advising a friend on the telephone on how best to clinch a £1m deal. In front of him was a small table and a bell with which to summon staff.

In the next room, his personal adviser on equities was checking the latest share prices on a 30in computer screen.

Sipping tea after his phone call, Usmanov studied the screen with the analyst as they discussed whether to sell a large holding in a Russian bank. A butler delivered frequent messages or passed on one of several mobile phones on which the tycoon fielded further calls.

“I’m less excited now by day-to-day business,” he explained as he kept an eye on a news bulletin on a gigantic flat-screen television.

“One thing I’ll always have a drive for, though, is the equity market. Intellectually I find the markets deeply stimulating. And then there are things like Arsenal. That’s a passion. It’s a fantastic team and a wonderful game I want to be a part of.”

Usmanov said that when the chance of buying into the club arose, he consulted Roman Abramovich, the owner of Chelsea, who told him: “It’s a great club, go for it.”

“I’m very surprised by all the press hostility,” Usmanov added. “The more I say that I’ve no intention of launching a hostile bid, the more people claim that it’s precisely what I want to do. I just don’t get it.”

It is all a far cry from the teenaged Usmanov’s dream of becoming a diplomat. His father held a powerful post in the Uzbek judicial system, his mother was a Russian language teacher and as a child of the elite, he was sent away at the age of 18 to study at the State Institute for International Relations in Moscow.

There, he read international law, Arabic and French and planned to join the Soviet diplomatic service in the Middle East.

He also became close friends with fellow students Sergei Yastrzhembsky and Sergei Prikhodko, both now aides to Putin, and was later a pupil of Yevgeny Primakov, who went on to head Russia’s foreign intelligence service and was subsequently appointed foreign minister and prime minister.

“People say now that I’m well connected in the Kremlin,” he said over a lunch of lamb stew and red wine served by the butler in one of his private dining rooms, a hall lined with gilded central Asian vases.

“Some of the people I know in the Kremlin have been close friends for decades. I’m not an oligarch because I’ve never received any favours from the state. I’m a businessman and don’t do politics.” After graduating in 1976 Usmanov returned to Uzbekistan where he worked for the Komsomol, the Communist party youth organisation. But his ambitions of travelling the world as a diplomat came to an abrupt end when he was 27.

A power struggle broke out between the KGB in Moscow and its Uzbek arm over the appointment of a new chairman of the Uzbek KGB.

The local secret police backed a general who was the father of Bakhodir Nasimov, one of Usmanov’s closest childhood friends. But Moscow favoured another candidate, who saw Nasimov’s father as a potential threat.

According to Usmanov, the Moscow nominee sought to destroy his rival’s career by framing his son, the young Nasimov, who was a junior KGB officer.

“Nasimov was sent on a covert operation,” recalled Usmanov as we strolled under the watchful eye of a guard from the wooden villa into his mansion, a two-storey stone and marble building with seven bedrooms, several large halls decorated with mosaics, a lift, an indoor swimming pool and a small cinema where the tycoon watches Arsenal’s matches.

“His bosses told him he was to accept a bribe from a guy involved in contraband so as to catch him red-handed. The point was to prosecute him for bribery. Nasimov told me that since the guy knew we were friends he might try to pass me the money. ‘If he does – take it,’ he told me, ‘and bring it to me’.”

As Usmanov was able to prove two decades later when he was finally cleared, the man with the money was a KGB agent posing as a criminal who had been instructed to frame Nasimov.

He approached Usmanov and offered him cash for Nasimov. Usmanov duly took it. Nasimov, Usmanov and another third friend who was the son of a high-ranking party official were arrested.

“I was hauled in and told to sign a confession,” the billionaire recalled. “‘Confess that you took a bribe to pass on to Nasimov for his father.’ I refused and went on an eight-day hunger strike, fearing that they would try to poison me.

“Then they told me that they’d just get rid of me. I thought they’d kill me so I signed.”

The three young men were sentenced by a military court to eight years for fraud and embezzlement of state property. That they were jailed despite being the children of high-ranking officials demonstrated that the charges were politically motivated, Usmanov said.

“If I’d really committed a crime, my father, as deputy prosecutor, was sufficiently influential to have spared me an eight-year sentence. He couldn’t come to my rescue because the charges were trumped up for political reasons.”

Instead of being sent to a relatively safe penal colony for state officials, he was locked up in an ordinary one. He survived after a prison strongman took a liking to him and warned others not to harm him.

Nasimov was less fortunate. He lost his mind and according to Usmanov is still in a mental institution.

“Prison is a world apart. It has its own rules and its own reality,” Usmanov said. “I was strong, believed in myself and didn’t get corrupted.

“I was helped by people inside and the fact that they were criminals is no reason to forget that they saved my life. To this day I’m angry that all those years were taken away from me and wasted.”

Released as a result of reforms introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, Usmanov married his teenage sweetheart, Irina Viner, who later became an Olympic gymnast.

He had proposed to Viner from prison. “He sent me a handkerchief which, according to Uzbek tradition, is a proposal of marriage,” she said recently. “I still keep it.”

Having lost any chance of a diplomatic career, Usmanov quickly took advantage of the business opportunities that opened up in the early days of perestroika. His first venture was making plastic shopping bags.

“It was a lucrative business which taught me a lot,” he said. When Russian banks began to offer loans in the early 1990s, he borrowed several million dollars and displayed a talent for share-dealing.

“I quickly realised that the equity market offered a sea of opportunities. We sold and bought whatever we could. We had a few failures and many suc-cesses. To me it was like an education and few things are as intellectually stimulating as getting a deal right.”

Usmanov bought up former Soviet assets. He engineered leveraged buy-outs of the Oskolsky Electric Metallurgical Combine, the Lebedinsky Mining Combine and the Olenegorsk Combine. The deals made him a leading force in the iron and steel industry.

“Those were tough and dangerous times,” he recalled. “Getting the right security and protection was paramount. Everything is much easier now. The legal framework is there and thanks to Putin, the country is back on track.”

Usmanov snapped up another lucrative 15% stake in the UK-based steel maker Corus in 2002. He bought Gazprom shares, at a time when others had little faith in the gas giant’s future and went on to become president of GazpromInvest-Holding and owner of the Gaz-Metall/Metalloinvest Group, which controls 40% of iron ore production in Russia and two of the country’s largest steelworks.

He has since expanded his empire by buying a stake in Russia’s third-largest mobile phone network and recently purchased Kommersant, an influential daily newspaper, for £100m. The paper used to be owned by Boris Berezovsky, the London-based tycoon and fierce critic of Putin.

“I’ve been very blessed in life,” said Usmanov as he showed me a collection of Soviet art, a cellar stacked with rare wines, and a large mural depicting figures from Uzbek folklore.

“I have everything, except children. That’s the only thing missing in my life. Those who know me and have done business with me know that I’m an honest person. I’ve proven that what happened to me as a young man was the result of political infighting.

“I was a victim and when I came out I realised I had one last chance to make a success of my life. I won’t fall so low as to fight those who want to blacken my name. Let their slurs weigh on their conscience. Mine is clean.”

Making of a tycoon

1953 Born in Uzbekistan, son of former Soviet republic’s deputy prosecutor. Enjoys a privileged upbringing

1971 Moves to Moscow to study at State Institute for International Relations

1977 Works for Komsomol, Communist party youth organisation

1980 Sentenced to eight years in penal colony for fraud and embezzlement

1986 Released two years early and goes into business

2000 Convictions quashed and criminal record expunged

2002 Buys 15% of UK-based steelmaker Corus

2004 Awarded presidential Medal of Honour by Vladimir Putin for services to business and charity

2006 Buys Kommersant, a newspaper formerly owned by Boris Berezovsky

2007 Buys 23% of Arsenal

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