GOVERNMENT remained mum yesterday on whether it had commenced investigations into a British lawyer's appointment to the board of directors at the Bermuda Commercial Bank.

Finance Minister Paula Cox earlier claimed that the BCB had bypassed normal Bermuda Monetary Authority vetting procedures in appointing Stephen Curtis to its board of directors.

When contacted yesterday however, Ms Cox directed queries to Munro Sutherland of the BMA who could not say whether an investigation was ongoing, or had ever begun.

"I don't think I'm really able to comment," he said. "We're really not able to comment on individual cases."

Curtis died in a fiery helicopter crash in England earlier this year only days after becoming an informant for British intelligence on the activities of Russian oil executives suspected of criminal activity, according to Russian and British media reports.

He had been receiving death threats on a daily basis. The late BCB director had been brought in by Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky to run his multi-billion-dollar oil and petroleum empire after he and his partner, Platon Lebedev, were jailed last July.

Khodorkovsky's Yukos oil company was raided by Russian authorities last week seeking $3 billion in unpaid taxes.

Both Khodorkovsky and Lebedev appeared in a Moscow court yesterday when they pleaded not guilty to charges including fraud and tax evasion. The pair were required to answer to 11 charges on seven articles of the Russian criminal code, in one of the most prominent cases in post-Soviet jurisprudence. They face up to ten years in prison. Hearings resumed today.

Curtis, 45, was the mastermind of the vast web of off-shore structures that eventually became Group Menatep, the parent company of Yukos. He feared for his life in the weeks before he died, the Russian St. Petersberg Times has reported, citing unnamed friends of Curtis.

The Mid-Ocean News exposed Curtis' links with the BCB last month. At that time Ms Cox told this paper that the BMA was investigating his appointment to the BCB's board.

By law, financial institutions are obliged to inform the BMA of any change to the board within 14 days. According to Ms Cox, the BCB did not do so.

In a statement to The Royal Gazette, the BCB maintained it followed procedure and stood behind Curtis, whom it described as "a well-respected English lawyer".

The bank said it had advised the chairman of the BMA of Curtis' proposed election to the board in writing on December 2, 2003.

"In accordance with the Banks and Deposit Companies Act, and in accordance with discussions with the BMA staff, the appropriate questionnaire for senior executives controllers and directors was completed and signed by Mr. Curtis and duly filed with the BMA," the statement read.

". . . in no time has the BMA questioned or challenged whether BCB correctly and timely informed the BMA of Mr. Curtis' election to the board, and at no time, has the BMA asserted any 'case' against BCB in regard to this matter."

Yesterday, Shadow Finance Minister and Opposition Leader Grant Gibbons said Bermuda's reputation rested on the shoulders of the Minister and the BMA.

"It's regrettable that neither the Minister nor the BMA were prepared to assure the public that proper due diligence was carried out on the Bermuda Commercial Bank director or that the appropriate notification process was followed in his appointment," he said.

"The job of the Minister and the BMA is to protect Bermuda's reputation and also to be seen to be protecting it by the public and the international community."

Curtis' Agusta A109 helicopter slammed into a field about one mile east of Bournemouth airport in southern England about 7.40 p.m. on March 3 as he was returning to his castle, Pennsylvania, killing him and the pilot.

British civil aviation authorities are still investigating the reasons for the crash. Scotland Yard's National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS) would neither confirm nor deny that a high-level criminal inquiry had been opened into the crash.

Curtis was appointed managing director of Group Menatep, the parent company of Yukos, Russia's most valuable oil company, in November, shortly after Khodorkovsky was arrested on charges of tax evasion and fraud.

Curtis was appointed to the board of the Bermuda Commercial Bank on December 10 last year. Commercial Bank chairman John Deuss is a Bermuda-based oil magnate and former chairman of the Oil Company of Oman (see separate page 1 story).

Curtis, who has a long history of involvement with influential businessmen in the Middle East, had been peripherally involved with Menatep since 1997 and was instrumental in creating the holding's complicated off-shore network, according to documents obtained by the St. Petersburg Times.

ACCORDING to Britain's Channel 4 News, Curtis approached the NCIS with an offer "to provide them with information" but only managed to meet with his NCIS handler on two occasions before he died. Neither Channel 4 News nor the UK's Independent on Sunday newspaper could say conclusively what kind of information Curtis was offering, or whether it related directly to charges laid against Khodorkovsky and Lebedev.

Channel 4 said that friends of Curtis' said he was receiving death threats by telephone daily and was considering selling his London penthouse because it was too well known. Group Menatep spokesman Yury Kotler called Curtis' death a "huge loss", but said that he had not heard that Curtis was receiving death threats. He declined to comment further.

A spokesman for NCIS, an intelligence agency that investigates organised crime, declined to comment outside of saying that the agency, which houses the London offices of Interpol and Europol, has broad information sharing agreements on issues like money laundering with a number of countries, including Russia.

In May 2003, for example, a delegation of NCIS officials travelled to Moscow to sign an information-sharing agreement with the Financial Monitoring Committee, which Russia created to combat money laundering.

Exiled Russian billionaire Boris Berezovsky cryptically told Channel 4 in English that there were "a lot of strange co-incidentals" regarding the crash.

"I don't like strange co-incidentals," he said.

Details of the crash that killed Curtis are still scarce. Officials at the UK's Air Accident Investigation Branch, which is handling the investigation, issued a special bulletin earlier this month with very cursory details of the crash, but cautioned that a final ruling on the cause could take months.

After requesting permission to land, the pilot reported an unspecified problem and lost control of the helicopter during its final approach to the airport, according to the bulletin.

The pilot was in direct radio contact with the visual controller at the airport for the last 29 seconds of the flight, but did not describe the problem, it said.

Witnesses have said they heard the sound of the helicopter's rotor cut out. The helicopter then struck the ground nose-first at high speed, exploding on impact and sending a fireball ten meters into the air. The bodies of Curtis and his pilot, Matthew Radford, 34, were badly burned and had to be identified from DNA samples, which took nearly three weeks.

Although early reports had said the helicopter appeared to hit a power line during descent, a spokeswoman for Southern Electric, the local electricity and gas distributor, said they were untrue.

"We were called because the helicopter had come down next to some electricity wires, but it was confirmed that it did not come in contact with them there," said Jennifer McGregor, a press officer at Southern Electric. "There was no involvement there."

John Hayes, director of air safety at Airclaims Ltd., a British-based aviation consultancy, said the report itself does not appear to indicate anything more than a tragic accident.

"Based on what is in the public domain, I see no reason to think of sabotage," he said.

Hayes said that helicopter crashes did not often result in large fires, but "the fact that there's a fire itself shouldn't suggest anything untoward".

According to Channel 4, Curtis was prepared to die and left money in his will to pay for fireworks at his funeral. The station said he had a rare blood disease and hoped to live until the age of 50. He was 45.