MOSCOW (Reuters) - Vladimir Yakunin, the head of Russian state railways and an old friend of President Vladimir Putin, will leave his post to become a senator in a rare reshuffle among the Kremlin inner circle that controls large parts of the country's economy.
The move would be a significant demotion for Yakunin who has headed Russian Railways - a huge state corporation with more than $40 billion in annual sales - for ten years and known Putin since they founded an elite housing cooperative together in St Petersburg in the 1990s.