© AFPDmitry Rybolovlev attends football match.
Police searched the $300 million Cote d'Azur penthouse that belongs to Rybolovlev on Tuesday morning, according to Le Monde.
The businessman, whose fortune is estimated at $6.8 billion by Forbes, was then taken into custody. The detention is linked to an investigation into "corruption" and "influence peddling" by Monaco authorities, it is said.
The arrest of the 51-year-old took place hours before his football team, AS Monaco, took to the field in the Champions League at the Stade Louis II.
Reacting to the report, Rybolovlev's lawyers, Herve Temime and Thomas Giaccardi, said that they "regret the breach of confidentiality of the inquiry that this information represents." "We request that the presumption of innocence in relation to Mr Rybolovlev is strictly respected."
In September 2017, Philippe Narmino, the justice minister of the principality, resigned his post after French media leaked text messages suggesting his complicity with Rybolovlev in a billion-dollar art fraud case. The Urals-born billionaire allegedly influenced Narmino to pursue and arrest Yves Bouvier, a Swiss art dealer whom Rybolovlev accuses of defrauding him.
Thick as thieves
The detention is the latest dramatic chapter in a half-decade marked by spectacular turns of fortune for the Russian, making headlines in the business, art, sports, and politics sections of newspapers worldwide.
A cardiologist by training, Rybolovlev made the bulk of his capital when he was able to cheaply acquire the majority of Uralkali, a major potash concern, following its post-Soviet privatization, and develop it into a multi-billion dollar company in subsequent years.
This is not the first time he has been detained. Rybolovlev also spent a year in jail in Russia on charges of murdering a business rival in the mid-1990s, before being acquitted due to an 11th-hour confession from another man.
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