If President Vladimir Putin intended to send a message to the business community Thursday, he let events speak for themselves

If President Vladimir Putin intended to send a message to the business community Thursday, he let events speak for themselves. As he met with the country's most influential businessmen in the Kremlin, Putin remained markedly silent on the biggest news of the day -- the announcement of an additional $3.4 billion tax bill for battered oil giant Yukos and the arrest of its bank accounts in Russia. Instead the president used the meeting -- his first with the country's top business lobby since November -- to preach on his usual themes of paying taxes, showing social responsibility and overcoming poverty. The 21 assembled members of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, or RSPP, and other lobby groups, only learned of the new tax claim against Yukos upon emerging from the 2 1/2 -hour meeting Thursday evening. "I don't think anything about it. I haven't hear anything about it. You are the first to tell me," said head of Severstal Group Alexei Mordashov, when asked what he thought about the new tax claim in an interview on NTV's 10 o'clock nightly news program. "If I knew, we would have raised this ssue," Arkady Volsky, RSPP head told Ekho Moskvy in an interview late Thursday. "The situation around Yukos was not concretely discussed," said Renaissance Capital's Alexander Shokhin, who attended the gathering. Present were some of the country's richest men, from oil and metals tycoons Viktor Vekselberg and Oleg Deripaska to bankers Mikhail Fridman and Andrei Kostin.