Perhaps the best thing about being an oligarch – if you have any money left, that is – is the ability to hire your own partisan (Russian for “guerrilla”) army. And Mikhail Prokhorov, now the richest man in Russia by sheer luck, may have just such an army.

Yesterday, Pushkinist (pictured here), an aptly named blogger on f5.ru, a brand new newspaper launched last month by Prokhorov, announced that an anonymous horde of Russian hackers had disabled the website of the French Ministry of Justice. The site was still out today, but it is unclear if it is because of said partisan horde, since Pushkinist gave them the wrong address for the Ministry’s site. But no matter! Justice – real justice – was being served! Using nothing short of “the people’s methods”! The hackers, Pushkinist said, were standing up for the seven young Russian women suing the French government in the small French town of Chambéry, near Lyon.

The women had been arrested, along with 19 others, on January 12, 2007 at the posh resort of Courchevel, in the French Alps. Most of those detained were suspected to be Russian prostitutes, one was an Austrian travel agent who had organized their passage, and one was Prokhorov, a well-known playboy, who was under suspicion of having used said travel agent to bring said prostitutes and making them available to his guests to sweeten their New Year’s celebration.

It turned out, however, that the women had received no money; instead, they had been showered with furs, jewelry, and designer clothing. The French authorities were baffled. Were they not, then, prostitutes, but friends, as Prokhorov claimed? Were the furs and baubles just gifts? In the end no one was charged, and Prokhorov was released after four days of questioning. He returned, shame-faced, to Moscow, where he was forced to sell his 25% share in Norilsk Nickel, which, though embarrassing at the time, saved him from the plummeting commodity prices around the corner. Now everyone else is nearly bankrupt and choked with debt, and Prokhorov, a Gumby-like 43-year-old, is sitting pretty on a pile of cash -- $5 billion, to be exact – which he uses to fund ventures like f5.ru and, perhaps, a cyber attack on the tribunal at Chambéry on behalf of his, er, friends who simply want their, um, gifts back.

Sorin Margulis, who represents the women in their quest to retrieve their furs and overturn their arrests, said the guerilla hacker action was a myth. “I have never heard about such a hacking story and have serious doubt about its veracity anyway,” he said when reached for comment. “Whether or not this is an imaginative story or a sort of joke, I would like to stress one more time that such practice is extremely negative and harmful for my clients.”

The Russian partisans, however, know what’s really best for Margulis’s clients. They’re circulating a petition that protests the French authorities’ detainment of Prokhorov’s friends – “great girls, athletes,” really – besmirching their reputations for the sake of a procedural “check mark.” While some commenters on f5.ru compared the hackers’ campaign to the Battle of Borodino, which so decimated Napoleon’s troops that he would never stage another offensive on Russian soil, others had a different, more forward analogy: “Our slogan,” the petition says, “is: A French kiss for French justice!”

Ministry of Justice Site is Down [Pushkinist (in Russian)]