A Sochi court on Monday ruled to strike businessman Alexander Lebedev from the ballot in the city's April 26 mayoral election, ratcheting up tensions in the country's most intriguing political battle this year.

Sochi's Central District Court invalidated Lebedev's registration, the businessman's spokesman, Artyom Artyomov, told The Moscow Times.

"It was an absolutely illegal decision. The prosecutor and the elections commission were against it," Artyomov said. "There were no violations."

Sochi is slated to host the 2014 Winter Olympics, a project for which the federal government has earmarked billions of dollars, and the next mayor will have a strong say over how the government will spend the money.

Monday's court ruling was a response to a complaint by another candidate, Krasnodar businessman Vladimir Trukhanovsky, who claimed that Lebedev had failed to properly fill out his registration paperwork, Lebedev wrote on his blog.

"It's the usual trick to get rid of a strong candidate," Lebedev wrote on his LiveJournal blog on Monday afternoon. "We will appeal, and the election campaign will continue."

The exact basis for the ruling was unclear, and a spokeswoman for the Sochi elections commission said she could not comment on the decision.

MT Lebedev

Sochi elections commission member Sergei Mendeleyev told Interfax that the court had declared Lebedev's registration illegal but had not annulled it. "This is nonsense in court practice, and we don't know that this court decision will be carried out," Mendeleyev said.

Lebedev, who holds a blocking stake in Aeroflot and has stepped up his activity in liberal politics recently, posted an appeal to Central Elections Commission chief Vladimir Churov on his blog, asking him to intervene. Any technical violations in his registration should have been noted by the Sochi elections commission when he submitted his application, Lebedev wrote. After his application was accepted, a court can only annul it if he knowingly withheld information, he wrote.

Lebedev reported to Sochi police Monday that his campaign posters in the Black Sea resort had been torn down, RIA-Novosti reported.

Lebedev is one of the more prominent candidates in the race. Opposition politician Boris Nemtsov, a Sochi native, is also running, while ruling party United Russia is backing acting Sochi Mayor Anatoly Pakhomov.

Nemtsov has accused police of illegally confiscating tens of thousands of his campaign pamphlets as part of a drive by regional authorities to derail his bid.

MT Bogdanov

A telephone poll conducted last week by the Foundation for Studying the Problems of Democracy, which is headed by a member of United Russia, found that 56 percent of Sochi voters plan to vote for Pakhomov, 13.5 percent for Communist Party candidate Yury Dzagania, 6.8 percent for Nemtsov and 2.1 percent for Lebedev.

Nemtsov's campaign team conducted a poll in March that found that 20 percent of Sochi voters would cast their ballots for Nemtsov.

Nemtsov's spokeswoman, Olga Shorina, said Monday that she has no fresh poll results but that Nemtsov's campaign predicts that no single candidate will capture 50 percent, thus forcing a second round of voting.

Lebedev's removal was predictable, said Alexei Titkov, an analyst with the Institute of Regional Politics. "Finding a violation on the part of a candidate and removing him is a matter of technique. There was a great chance that Lebedev would be removed," he said.

Lebedev "could have counted on up to 10 percent of the vote," Titkov said.

AP Nemtsov

If Lebedev is prevented from running, voters who supported him as a "businessman who is close to power" and a former security services agent will vote for United Russia, while others will turn to the Communist candidate, Titkov predicted.

"I'm not sure that this is a good move for the United Russia candidate, because in principle, it's beneficial for him to have the vote divided up between several candidates," Titkov said.

Nevertheless, the election would be "calmer" for United Russia without Lebedev, whose expensive campaign has placed ads all over Sochi, Titkov said.

Meanwhile, former presidential candidate Andrei Bogdanov announced Monday that he was stepping out of the Sochi election and called for his supporters to back Pakho-mov.

"The most important factor was the necessity of holding the Olympics in Sochi," Bogdanov told a news conference.

He said he opposed Nemtsov's proposal for the Olympics to be held simultaneously in other Russian cities as well.

Bogdanov, whose exit brings the number of candidates in the Sochi election down to eight, said he had not consulted with United Russia about his decision. "I didn't meet anyone or hold any consultations. People have asked me if there was a deal. There wasn't any dealing, there isn't any now and there won't be any. This is just my political statement," he said.

Bogdanov ran for president last year, garnering less than one percent of the vote in an election that Dmitry Medvedev won in a landslide. His presidential bid was widely seen as a Kremlin attempt to give voters a nominal liberal choice on the ballot.