Former Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov said Thursday that he has received a job offer from long-time friend and AFK Sistema head Vladimir Yevtushkenov, Interfax reported.
Luzhkov, 74, said he would give his answer to the offer in the near future.
"I have received an offer from Vladimir Yevtushenkov, and it seems interesting to me," the former mayor told Interfax.
An unnamed source told the news agency that Luzhkov, who worked in the Soviet chemical industry for three decades before going into politics, could become the head of Sistema's petrochemicals division.
Yevtushenkov and Luzhkov have been close family friends since at least the early 1990s. Yevtushenkov said last year that he had offered Luzhkov a position at Sistema, whose holdings include oil major Bashneft and telecommunications giant Mobile TeleSystems, or MTS, but Luzhkov refused.
Luzhkov served as the city's top official from 1992 to 2010. He was fired from his post by President Dmitry Medvedev in September 2010 after a series of disputes between the two. Soon after his exit from City Hall, Luzhkov took a job as a professor at International University in Moscow.
There was speculation following Luzhkov's firing that he would leave Russia to avoid possible prosecution on corruption charges, but he has insisted he will not flee. He was questioned last year by investigators in a criminal case involving his wife Yelena Baturina's former company Inteko and formerly city-owned Bank of Moscow. Baturina reportedly lives in London with the couple's two daughters, who attend university in England.
