London, April 23:

A dramatic worsening of relations between the UK and Russia has unnerved the British business community and led to a partial boycott of a key bilateral conference on economic affairs scheduled to start in London today and attended by the UK trade and industry secretary, Alistair Darling.

One third of UK business leaders said the rapport between Britain and Russia was either “difficult and getting worse” or “strained and unfriendly” while nearly half consider further Russian investment in the UK asa “bad thing”, according to a YouGov poll.

The results have been released on the eve of the annual Russian Economic Forum at the Queen Elizabeth 2 Centre in central London, an event which has already been damaged by a walkout by top Russian speakers linkedto the Kremlin.

The poll for YouGov, which shows that 62 per cent of those responding believe Russian businessmen are “arrogant”, 59 per cent agreed that they were “lawless” and 47 per cent said they were “unreliable” was conducted between April 10 and 15, just as a series on Russia was published by the Guardian.

In one article, the London-based Russian dissident Boris Berezovskycalled for the violent overthrow of Vladimir Putin’s government, a statement which led to Kremlin calls for Britain to hand him over and sent UK-Russian relations plunging.

This is seen as one reason why half a dozen top speakers from Russia, including Arkady Dvorkovich, Putin’s special economic adviser, and Kirill Androsov, deputy minister of economic trade and development, have also cancelled their appearances.

Other speakers who have abruptly pulled out include Sergei Bogdanchikov, president of largely state-owned oil group Rosneft, plus Peter Aven, chief executive of Alfa Bank. The relations between the two countries on economic affairs have not been helped by Kremlin flexing its muscles with the state-owned Gazprom securing Shell’s agreement to hand over a 50 per cent stake in the massive Sakhalin-2 liquefied natural gas project.