The Mikhail D. Prokhorov era should start next week for the Brooklyn-bound New Jersey Nets. On Tuesday, nearly eight months after Prokhorov came to the fiscal rescue of the Nets' owner, Bruce Ratner, the NBA board of governors is expected to give him its approval to become an owner. The following day, Prokhorov's $200 million deal to buy 80 percent of the worst team in the league and 45 percent of the Barclays Center in Brooklyn is likely to close. If nothing goes awry, Prokhorov, a Russian billionaire and adrenaline-seeking athlete, will be able to attend the May 18 draft lottery as the Nets' majority owner, giving him enough time to practice his celebratory back flips if his team gets the No. 1 pick. What took so long to get here? Vetting him did not take too much time. In October, a month after he agreed in principle to buy the team, Commissioner David Stern said nothing negative had surfaced. Then, in mid-December, Stern said that multiple investigations had found nothing to prevent Prokhorov from becoming the first overseas owner of an NBA team. The league has refused to say which outside investigation firm, or firms, handled the vetting. More recently, league officials said that the owners' vote on Prokhorov would be delayed until the departure of the last three property owners at Atlantic Yards, where the arena will be the showpiece of Ratner's 22-acre, $4.5 billion Brooklyn development. The owners were scheduled to vacate their respective premises Friday. Leagues generally do not say much about the details of vetting prospective owners. It is a sensitive personnel process most often involving very wealthy people. But Prokhorov is a special case. First, a foreign owner of a major league U.S. team is a rarity (the only other one is the Nintendo money that went into acquiring the Seattle Mariners). Second, no American league has vetted anyone like Prokhorov, who has benefited mightily from Russia's frenetic transformation to capitalism. Last month, The New York Post reported that Prokhorov was doing business in violation of American and European economic sanctions against Zimbabwe and its dictator, Robert Mugabe. The league and Prokhorov said he was not violating any sanctions. But the report was seized on by Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr., D-N.J., who demanded that the Treasury Department, which administers the sanctions first imposed by President George W. Bush in 2003, investigate Prokhorov. Pascrell, who has parochial interests in opposing the team's move from New Jersey, said the real issue is who the NBA does business with. Here is where things get a little murky because we're dealing with a Russian billionaire with global business interests that are not as transparent as prospective owners with extensive public holdings. Certainly, it was easier to vet Michael Jordan's finances before he was approved to own the Charlotte Bobcats. Onexim Group, the company through which Prokhorov is buying the Nets, last year bought nearly 50 percent of an investment bank called Renaissance Capital, a division of Renaissance Group. Quinn Martin, a spokesman for RenCap, as it is called, said it owns no Zimbabwean companies and that its only presence in the country is in stock research. Attempts to independently verify Martin's claims were unsuccessful. He pointed to the sister company Renaissance Partners as the division of the group that he said is active in Zimbabwe. It owns a substantial part of the Commercial Bank of Zimbabwe, which until 2003 was run by Gideon Gono, now the nation's central banker. (Various reports at the time of the purchase of shares point to RenCap, not Renaissance Partners, as the purchaser.) Gono, who is known as Mugabe's banker, is on the sanctions list. Some Zimbabwean banks are on it. But the Commercial Bank of Zimbabwe is not on the list. Robert Reid, managing director of Renaissance Partners, said in a statement that his company 'has had no dealing with individuals or companies on the sanctions list.' Pascrell chooses not to draw distinctions between the different parts of Renaissance Group, believing they are intertwined and thereby complicit in possibly flouting sanctions in Zimbabwe. Last week, he said in a telephone interview: 'Prokhorov owns 50 percent of Renaissance, it's actively invested in Zimbabwe, and it's got a stake in CBZ, which is a chief prop for Mugabe.' He also said that Stern had not taken any of this seriously enough. 'He jokes this off,' Pascrell said. 'This is a big joke to him.' Mike Bass, a league spokesman, said, 'We have no further comment on the congressman's factually unsupported allegations.' Pascrell's larger concern is whether the vetting of Prokhorov was thorough enough. Last fall, Stern said the investigation into Prokhorov would be 'very extensive, stringent, some would say, invasive.' On Friday, Bass said that generally, 'it is fair to say that we do not routinely investigate the business operations of every company in which a prospective owner has invested.' It makes you wonder what the league did not investigate about Prokhorov. 