Oil giant in Russia is closer to collapse

[oldhat]

http://iht.com/articles/2004/11/25/business/yukos.html

Oil giant in Russia is closer to collapse

MOSCOW Yukos has moved closer to collapse after six of the Russian oil company's top executives, including the American chief executive and the chief financial officer, fled the country, citing fear of persecution from the Kremlin.
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Prosecutors are shifting their attention to senior Yukos executives, a development that could pave the way for the government to become the new owner of the company, industry analysts said. With the top managers leaving Moscow, "this could give the state legal grounds to install outside management," said James Fenkner, head of research at Troika Dialog, a Moscow brokerage.
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Steven Dashevsky, an oil analyst at Aton Capital, said: "This leaves Yukos even more paralyzed than before, as management was already struggling to run the company on a day-to-day basis amid a cash flow squeeze."
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All six members of the giant oil company's management committee have now left the country. The chief executive, Stephen Theede, is a U.S. citizen. A Yukos spokesman said Thursday that Theede would continue traveling in Europe and to the United States in the coming days.
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Bruce Misamore, who is also an American and who has been Yukos's chief financial officer since 2001, said he did not plan to return to Russia until he was certain that his safety and his family's were not in jeopardy. Misamore was asked this week to appear for questioning by the general prosecutor's office in Russia, but he was in London for a previously scheduled Yukos management meeting. He decided not to return, he said.
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No formal charges have been filed against any American or other expatriate employee of Yukos.
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[Wright Patman]

1. Khodorkovsky

stole Yukos "fair and square" from the drunk Yeltsin ("here, sign this, Boris Nikolayevich; I promise you'll get a good cut of the loot"). How dare the Russian government make a move like this to redeem fraudulently-obtained property.

IMHO, Putin can be likened to Teddy Roosevelt breaking up the Standard Oil Trust in terms of his dealings, extralegal though they may be, with the oligarchs. You have to fight fire with fire.

If a U.S. president ever stood up to the megacorporations like this, he'd be immediately shot and you can be damned sure the voting machines would be programmed to vote him out in a landslide if somehow he survived to run for a second term.