On Friday, Russian police said Mogilevich had been detained under one of his many aliases, Sergei Schneider. Russia's Interior Ministry told the Guardian: “We have been pursuing him for 15 years. We arrested him as Sergei Schneider in connection with tax evasion. It was only after his arrest that we realised who he was.”Police launched the operation in connection with an investigation into alleged tax evasion by the owners of Arbat Prestige, a chain of cosmetic stores.

Around 50 police commandos in balaclavas grabbed Mogilevich on the street along with Vladimir Nekrasov, Arbat Prestige’s majority owner.

Photos in Russian papers reveal the 61-year-old Ukrainian-born Russian citizen to be a thickset man in late middle age. Nicknamed ‘The Brainy Don’ - he has an economics degree - he joined a Moscow crime gang in the 1970s, and was jailed twice for theft and fraud. In the 1980s Mogilevich bought properties of Russian Jews emigrating to Israel, promising to sell them and send them the funds. But the money never arrived.

In the 1990s he transferred the base of his operations to Hungary. There, Mogilevich was allegedly involved in prostitution and smuggling. Much of his money was laundered via London.

‘Top criminal’

In 1995 the British authorities closed down his UK operation - describing him in one classified report as “one of the world’s top criminals” with an estimated $100m fortune.  The FBI put him on its most wanted list in 2003.