A Russian fringe party which has seen two of its founding members shot dead in the past 10 months on Saturday reinstated exiled financier and Kremlin foe Boris Berezovsky as a leading member, media reported.
Members at a special congress of the Liberal Russia party approved a resolution "authorizing Berezovsky to make official statements on the party's behalf on important issues," the Interfax news agency said.
Berezovsky, who has opted to live permanently in Britain rather than face fraud charges in Russia he has called "political," founded the party in May 2001 in order to create a "true opposition party". A founding congress was held in March 2002.
Berezovsky was later expelled because he contacted the Communist party in a bid to fund a two-pronged offensive against President Vladimir Putin.
The controversial businessman, who had close ties to the Kremlin for many years in the 1990s, originally backed Putin to succeed Boris Yeltsin in the Kremlin when Russia's first president backed down, but turned against him when he felt himself being sidelined.
Addressing the congress by means of a television link-up, Berezovsky outlined his views on the tactics that the party should adopt in parliamentary elections scheduled for next December.
Liberal Russia succeeded in registering for the elections only two months ago, hours before their most prominent member, Sergei Yushenkov, was gunned down in a Moscow street.
The interior ministry had previously refused to register the party for "technical reasons".
Yushenkov was the second of the party's founding members to die violently following the murder of deputy Vladimir Golovlev on August 21 last year, in Moscow.
Berezovsky, who last year pledged some US$100 million for the party's election campaign, told the congress the party should set up a means of protection for members who, he said, were "coming under pressure from the authorities."
The self-exiled financier has accused the Kremlin of creeping authoritarianism with crackdowns on press freedom and charged that the security services were behind the 1999 apartment block bombings that Putin used to justify the war in Chechnya.
He said the party should consider allying with other political groupings on the centre-right of Russian politics.
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