Robert Amsterdam is an international lawyer who was expelled last year from Russia over his work for the jailed oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

His client is serving eight years in a Siberian prison camp for fraud and tax evasion at the energy company he once owned, Yukos.

The temperature frequently drops as low as minus 40 degrees in the camp near Russia's border with China, but Mr Amsterdam presents a case that is even more chilling. This US-Canadian lawyer says his client's plight is the direct result of grand-scale theft and rampant disregard for the rule of law by the government of Vladimir Putin.

Mr Putin and his government dispute that analysis, but Mr Amsterdam presents the case for the defence in uncompromising terms. Adamant that right is on his side, he is in Dublin this week to highlight the affair.

He points out too that the Putin government's seizure of energy assets could have worrying implications for the supply of gas to Ireland, which is a net importer of gas.

The case has its genesis in the controversial privatisation of Russian state assets in the mid-1990s during the troubled presidency of Putin's predecessor, Boris Yeltsin. Khodorkovsky was just one of the "oligarchs" to emerge with a vast fortune from that process.

He bought a majority stake in the oil holding company Yukos for $309 million (€259 million), ruthlessly took full control of the group and built it into an entity that was valued, at its peak, at $35 billion. By any standards, Khodorkovsky's $15 billion personal fortune was immense. He was the richest man in Russia, a place where severe poverty is the norm for tens of millions.

Some say that it was Khodorkovsky's sponsorship of liberal political causes that provoked the ire of Putin, who had promised Russia's richest businessmen that they could keep their empires if they kept out of politics.

Mr Amsterdam says a move by Yukos into the gas sector was more important because it clashed with the interests of Gazprom, the gas giant controlled by the Russian state.

"It's very simple. Putin is Gazprom. Gazprom viewed Khodorkovsky as a threat because Khodorkovsky was getting into gas. That's one critical reason and there are many, many others. Essentially Khodorkovsky was a dynamic transparent entrepreneur in a country where corruption is exploding."

According to Mr Amsterdam, that was the cue for a tax case againt Yukos and Khodorkovsky, which resulted in his imprisonment and the seizure of the company by the Russian state. Citing a critical report by the Council of Europe human rights watchdog, he claims the trial was a sham and a farce.

"The destruction of Yukos was a tax-engineered state theft. What's truly amazing about it is that the Russians don't even try to justify it. This is what is the most shocking. They have been granted so much impunity and licence from the West that they can go out and steal an asset like this," he says.

So what does all this mean for Ireland? After addressing students yesterday in UCD, Mr Amsterdam said he took issue with recent remarks by former EU commissioner Peter Sutherland, the chairman of BP and Goldman Sachs, who spoke favourably last month of "workable" business conditions in Russia and the prospects for growth there.

"I won't speak ill of Mr Sutherland. He's a tremendously accomplished fellow. But take a look at what he said about Russia . . . I've read the Irish press. The pictures and the conferences about Russia present frankly a phoney picture of what's going on inside Russia."

More than that, Mr Amsterdam says Russia's decision to switch off gas supplies to Ukraine at the end of last year demonstrated that it was prepared to manipulate energy markets for its own ends.

He said this was an issue which concerned Ireland, since it was a gas-importing country.

"I haven't seen many statements going on in terms of Ireland where they've taken a strong position on the sorry state of the rule of law in Russia."

Mr Amsterdam says Khodorkovsky has no prospect of freedom before 2009 and says his client's sole objective for the moment is survival.

He will not say who is funding his Irish visit. He is meeting some politicians, but he won't say who. "People fear for their lives after meeting me."