They plan to turn it into a luxury hotel complex, complete with hundreds of elite flats, a Sotheby's-type auction house and a vast underground car park. The £230m redevelopment is being financed by Russia's United Industrial Corporation and has been approved by the Kremlin's property department, despite Red Square being on the Unesco World Heritage list. Construction work is due to start next year and the hotel complex is due to open at the end of 2008.The project is typical of Moscow's oil-driven construction boom in putting profit and modernity before heritage and preservation. Although the developers insist they will abide by the law and leave the fa?e of the merchants' building unchanged, they plan to conduct serious construction work behind and beneath its walls less than 300ft from St Basil's.Andrei Batalov, head of the cathedral's restoration commission, believes that the foundations of St Basil's could be damaged and the subsoil waters beneath it altered. One of Russia's most distinctive architectural landmarks, the 16th-century St Basil's Cathedral on Red Square, is at risk of being irreparably damaged by the construction of a nearby five-star hotel.

He has warned that cracks could open up in its walls as a result, and has said that vibrations from pile drivers will be bad for the structure, which has been perched on an artificial hill for almost five hundred years. Notes of €100 or €500 attract more attention in shops and tend to be shunned by counterfeiters.French police say there are a range of counterfeiters, from amateurs to organised crime gangs. With relatively cheap modern photocopying equipment, it is possible to produce crude, fake euro notes. Police say medium-sized operators can produce up to 100,000 notes a year and organised syndicates are able to churn out even more.. As a country with a large economy, at the crossroads of Europe, and a popular tourist destination, France sucks in euros- including the fake ones.The printing of convincing counterfeit euros appears to be big business, especially in eastern Europe, Italy and Colombia.Almost all the fake notes are in €50 and €20 denominations. There has been an even sharper rise in recent months of fake euro coins.France identifies more false notes than any other country but is not a large producer, according to French police. A determined faker can buy a machine which reproduces the holograms in euro notes for €50,000 (£34,000) - which would be covered by a print run of a few minutes.The amount of counterfeit currency found in the 12 euroland countries is 600,000 notes a year - about the same as before the single currency was introduced.

The notes were claimed to be the most advanced in the world, incorporating anti-faking devices from holograms to special inks.Now Europe's counterfeiters - and some elsewhere in the world, including Colombia - appear to have overcome the problems. About 30 per cent of them, 90,000 notes, were discovered in France. Most - 80 per cent - were printed in other countries. After the introduction of the euro in 12 countries on 1 January 2002, police detected a fall in the amount of counterfeit notes and coins in circulation in euroland. After initial discouragement, counterfeiters have cracked the code of the euro and continental countries - especially France - face a rising tide of fake bank notes and coins. In the first half of this year, 300,000 dud euro notes were withdrawn from circulation. It said the trio went Dutch in 1972 to have their millions managed from Amsterdam because they didn't trust British finance houses.Now they are making wills to ensure that beneficiaries don't end up squabbling when they are playing that great comeback tour in the sky. Details of the tax break were revealed in the country's trade registry, according to Die Welt.A Dutch holding company called Promogroup is the umbrella financial organisation that has been secretly managing the finances of the three original Stones for the past 35 years.The bassist Ronnie Wood doesn't qualify to have his assets managed by the Dutch group - with just £70m in the bank, he is the poor relation to the others in the band.The registry also pinpoints a "blueblood" as their finance manager: one German-Austrian Prince Rupprecht Ludwig Ferdinand zu Loewenstein-Wertheim-Freudenberg, who the band reportedly nicknamed "Ruppie the Groupie".Sabine Schuttgens, a lawyer who was involved in setting up the Stones' trusts in the Netherlands, said: "The foundations are to make sure that after the death of the rock stars there would be no arguments among their heirs.".