The trial and imprisonment of oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky has scarred Russia's business community and confidence may take years fully to recover, bankers and economists said.
Some stockbrokers are inclined to brush off the potential after-effects of the conviction of the man who in his heyday was Russia's richest businessman.
"It's really been an irritating whine in the background for most (portfolio) investors," said Roland Nash, a strategist at Renaissance Capital, a Moscow-based investment bank.
Financial markets barely flinched after Mr Khodorkovsky's sentencing to nine years in jail for tax evasion and fraud on Tuesday, but analysts say his trial and the destruction of his company Yukos has taken a toll on the real economy.
One of the biggest changes has been in the general atmosphere for people doing business here.
"There has been a breakdown of dialogue between the Russian government and the investor community. They are talking two different languages," said a lawyer with a prominent foreign practice in Moscow who asked not to be identified. Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said on Wednesday it would take time to repair the damage wrought by the Yukos affair.
"It caused a lowering of trust in the Russian economy. It will take some time to re-establish that trust," he added. Mr Khodorkovsky's shock arrest in October 2003 came at the height of an economic boom fuelled by foreign enthusiasm for investing in Russia's fabulous oil and mineral wealth.
British oil giant BP earlier in that year had announced it was paying $7 billion for a half stake in Russian oil firm TNK.
It was by far the biggest venture by a foreign enterprise since the fall of the Soviet Union and for many appeared to be a defining moment with potential to open the floodgates to foreign investment and herald a golden age for the economy.
Mr Khodorkovsky's arrest at gunpoint while on a flight to Siberia shattered the mood of optimism.
Many believe Mr Khodorkovsky provoked President Vladimir Putin by defying government taxation policies and pursuing an independent political agenda, in contravention of an unwritten rule that business magnates should steer clear of politics.
But the Kremlin's reaction stunned the business community and convinced many that the law was being applied selectively to destroy an enemy.
"We will probably never see the law being used in this way again as an instrument to destroy an oligarch (magnate)," said an influential foreign banker who advises corporate clients on investing in Russia.
"But it does not mean that other methods cannot be used. The pressure on big business has not gone," he said. "Any credibility that the Russian legal system had has been destroyed."
Foreigners, particularly those interested in Russia's oil and gas industry, have yet to be persuaded that the singling out of a businessman and his associates as targets of the judiciary will not be repeated.
"Foreign investors are much less constructive than they were two years ago," said the foreign banker. "They need to be much more convinced in a way that was not the case two years ago."
Russia's economy continued to grow at breakneck pace last year, but since a Kremlin-inspired assault on Yukos culminated in the renationalisation of its prize asset, Yuganskneftegaz, there has been a marked slowdown and investment has stuttered.
Another foreign banker, who advises overseas venture capitalists, said the risk of doing business in Russia had become uncomfortably high even though the potential rewards were still very attractive.