Citing a copy of a document from the Russian legal services, the show said that in 1995 the Russian tycoon bought the oil company Sibneft at a Russian state auction for just 250 million pounds.
This document, the product of a prosecutorial investigation that did not proceed, states that the Russian government was damaged by this transaction by $2.7 billion.
Roman Abramovich sold the same company back to the Russian state ten years later for $13 billion.
According to the BBC, at a trial in London against him in 2012 with his 1995 associate Boris Berezovsky as plaintiff, Roman Abramovich actually admitted that he had given Berezovsky $10 million to bribe a Kremlin official to acquire Sibneft.
The legal document adds that the relevant economic crimes department wanted to bring fraud charges against Mr Abramovich. The case did not proceed, however, as the then prosecutor in charge, Yuri Skuratov, told the BBC camera that Abramovich was a protégé of then President Yeltsin. As the programme revealed, more than half of the money to buy Sibneft was actually obtained by Abramovich from the Russian government itself through a pre-arranged bank loan.
Skuratov was dismissed from his post in 1999 when a sex tape featuring him was released. As he claimed on the show, it was a staged operation to deconstruct his investigation.
The BBC pointed out that Abramovich remained in the Kremlin inner circle when Vladimir Putin took over the reins in 2000.
Two years later he was part of a consortium that bought another oil company, Slavneft. There was also interest in this company from a Chinese group, but a member of the Chinese delegation was kidnapped when he arrived in Moscow for the auction.
There is no suggestion that Abramovich knew about the kidnapping, but Russia's then Deputy Energy Minister Vladimir Milov told Panorama that senior political officials had decided from the start that Slavneft would go to Roman Abramovich.
Lawyers for the Russian oligarch, who is now subject to severe sanctions by the British government, reject any suggestion of illegal actions that led to their client's acquisition of assets.
The show also featured a 2010 report by Spain's organized crime task force that
characterized Abramovich as a "manager of Putin's private financial interests."
Mr. Milov commented that Roman Abramovich may be sharing his wealth with the Russian president, who "would never, ever, ever give anything to anyone unless he had a direct financial interest."
Mr Abramovich's lawyers said their client rejects the claim that he was receiving protection from Yeltsin and now Putin or that he is acting as the current Russian president's "financial manager".
The Spanish report was, however, cited in a House of Commons debate ahead of sanctions against oligarchs following the Russian invasion of Ukraine by former Conservative minister David Davis.
Source: Cyprus Times
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