Roman Abramovich is said to be suspected to be part of an organised crime group which cheated the Russian government out of a $2.7 billion oil deal.
The BBC Panorama investigation comes as Roman Abramovich, along with a list of other Russian oligarchs, have been sanctioned from trading with Brits and traveling in the UK.
The oligarch owner of Chelsea FC made billions after buying the oil firm Sibneft for $250m in 1995, before selling it back to the Russian government a decade later for $13bn.
BBC Panorama said a document smuggled out of Russia shows that the Russian government was cheated out of $2.7bn in the Sibneft deal, which is backed up by a 1997 Russian parliamentary investigation.
The smuggled document also says that Russian authorities wanted to charge Roman Abramovich with fraud.
His lawyers told the BBC there was no basis for alleging that he had amassed his wealth through criminality.
Mr Abramovich already admitted in a UK court in 2012 that he had paid his former business associate Boris Berezovsky $10m to pay off a Kremlin official in the Sibneft case.
Russia’s former chief prosecutor Yuri Skuratov told the BBC: “Basically, it was a fraudulent scheme, where those who took part in the privatisation formed one criminal group that allowed Abramovich and Berezovsky to trick the government and not pay the money that this company was really worth.”
Skuratov was sacked when a sex tape was released in 1999, which he said was a stitch-up to discredit him and the investigation.
The BBC said the smuggled document also contains evidence of a rigged auction for another oil company, Slavneft, in 2002.
A member of the delegation from a rival Chinese bidder was kidnapped when they arrived in Moscow for the auction and was released once the firm withdrew.
There is no suggestion that Mr Abramovich knew anything about the kidnapping.