Moscow ? Black-uniformed special forces swept onto the airplane of Russia’s wealthiest man Saturday and forced him back to Moscow, where he was ordered jailed on criminal charges — a dramatic escalation of the politically charged investigation into Russia’s largest oil company.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky was charged Saturday with fraud, forgery and other crimes hours after the special forces troops, with weapons drawn, surrounded his private plane at a Siberian airport.

The dramatic arrest alarmed the country’s business and political elite, with many analysts saying the actions against Yukos are a Kremlin-directed campaign to keep Khodorkovsky out of politics.

Khodorkovsky, who has openly funded opposition parties, is the latest of Russia’s superrich oligarchs to be pursued by President Vladimir Putin’s government. Tycoons Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky have gone into self-imposed exile to avoid criminal prosecution.

The Prosecutor General’s Office charged Khodorkovsky with fraud, forgery, embezzlement and personal and corporate tax evasion, the news agency Interfax reported. A spokesman for the office told The Associated Press that charges had been filed, but gave no specifics.

The charges were filed in Moscow, where Khodorkovsky was brought after he was detained during a business trip in Novosibirsk, the main city of Siberia.

Khodorkovsky could be kept until Dec. 30 in a pre-trial detention facility, his lawyer Anton Drel said. The shabby and overcrowded detention units are widely considered worse than Russia’s prisons.

“The charges of the prosecutor are groundless. The detention of Mikhail Khodorkovsky is aimed at fanning a big scandal which would cover up the lack of evidence in the so-called Yukos case,” Yukos spokesman Alexander Shadrin told AP.