Billionaire Roman Abramovich, Russia's richest man and owner of English soccer club Chelsea, quit as a regional governor of today but his spokesman said he was not cutting ties with his home country.
Since his election in 2000, Mr Abramovich has invested hundreds of millions of dollars and used close Kremlin ties to fight poverty in the sparsely populated Chukotka region in Russia's Far East across the Bering Strait from Alaska.
But most Russians abhor the nation's super rich "oligarchs" who made huge fortunes trading the assets of the former superpower while millions of people faced ever grinding poverty.
Roman Abramovich on his tenure as governor of Chukotka
"He still considers Russia as his home," the spokesman said of the billionaire who mostly spends his time in Europe, including Britain, where he has property. He added that Mr Abramovich would continue to invest millions of dollars into the region.
The Russian edition of Forbesmagazine this year put Mr Abramovich's wealth, mostly from oil and aluminium assets, at $18.3 billion. Although his visits to Chukotka, an eight-hour flight and nine time zones away from Moscow, are likely to taper off, his spokesman said Mr Abramovich would maintain a home base there and continue to pay regional taxes.
The Kremlin said in a statement President Vladimir Putin had not yet made a decision about Mr Abramovich's request.
If Mr Putin accepts the resignation, Mr Abramovich will likely be sorely missed by Chukotka's community of reindeer herders, fishermen and miners whom he has saved from penury with cash and a hefty dose of entrepreneurial flair and energy.
"I think I have carried out my mission," Mr Abramovich was quoted as saying by French daily La Croix. "Chukotka has come out of the crisis. All that I could do, I have already done."
The bottom fell out of the heavily subsidised economy of Chukotka, where even basic foodstuffs are flown in from central Russia, when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991.
Most of the abundant mineral resources in the region, twice the size of Germany, lie deep beneath the ice and are expensive to extract, making the economy far from self-sufficient.