The Yukos affair
What are two Yanks doing running a Russian oil company
By Deirdre Griswold
If anything should set off whistles and bells for those
trying to understand what is happening in the struggle over
Russia's biggest oil company, it is the fact that the two top
officials of Yukos Oil are Steven M. Theede, the chief
executive officer (CEO), and Bruce K. Misamore, the chief
financial officer (CFO).
That's right. Not Ivan or Igor or Mikhail. Steven and Bruce,
who have been in charge of the oil company's fortunes, are U.S.
citizens, not even of Russian descent.
Yukos, according to the Dec. 1 New York Times, "accounts for
about 20 percent of oil production within Russia and about 25
percent of exports. It has about 14.7 billion barrels of oil
reserves, almost as much as OPEC members Algeria and Indonesia
combined."
Theede and Misamore hastily left Moscow the last week in
November. Theede went to Washington, where he has been having
meetings with unidentified administration officials. Dick
Cheney, perhaps? George W. Bush himself? There are plenty of
oil-related people in the administration who would be very
interested in talking to him.
The company's founder, Mikhail Kho dorkovsky, once the
richest man in Russia, has been in prison for the last year,
charged with tax evasion. When he was arrested, $14 billion
worth of stocks he held in Yukos Oil--44 percent of all shares
in the company--were frozen by government prosecutors, who said
Yukos owed Russia $24 billion in back taxes. This prevented him
from going through with a $20-billion projected investment deal
with Exxon-Mobil that undoubtedly was behind his downfall.
When Khodorkovsky was jailed, the crème de la
crème of Washington's oil-soaked political elite tried
to intervene on his behalf. Khodorkovsky had hobnobbed with
George H.W. Bush, the former president; Henry Kissinger, a
Rockefeller protégé; former New Jersey Sen. Bill
Bradley, who advises the Open Russia Foundation, funded by
Khodorkovsky; and former Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham. He
had also given large donations to the Car negie Endowment for
International Peace and the American Enterprise Institute,
bastions of imperialism.
The Wall Street Journal of Oct. 31, 2003, reported that "a
senior Bush administration official placed a call to a
counterpart in Moscow to inquire about the case earlier this
week. Yesterday, a Yukos representative met at the White House
with an official of the National Security Cou ncil." It was
almost a full-court press.
Restraining the Bush administration from going all-out to
grab Yukos, however, is its need for Russia's support in its
"war on terror." And perhaps the fear that crude U.S.
intervention in a grab for Russia's oil and gas resources would
unleash opposition from the masses of people themselves, who
are still not reconciled to the idea that the country's great
wealth should belong to a small class of super-rich
individuals, whether U.S. or Russian, while millions of workers
suffer horribly from the return to capitalism.
Russian president Vladimir Putin, who represents the new
class of Russian capitalists, is treading a delicate line with
Washington. He doesn't want the full force of U.S. hostility to
be turned in the direction of Russia, but at the same time he
is not the pliant buffoon playing Wash ington's game that his
predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, was. Yeltsin wound up with a
popularity rating of 6 percent in the polls--while he was still
president!
Putin is not talking about nationalizing Yukos--that would
really rev up Wash ington's attack dogs--but he is using the
tax issue to regain control over the important oil resources
that Khodor kovsky wanted to sell to the West. The Russian gov
ernment is preparing to auction off Yukos on Dec. 19--but at a
very low price, one that Russian financial groups can
afford.
Why can't the imperialist oil companies use this opportunity
to just step in and buy the oil cheap? Because the government
is attaching a huge back-tax indemnity to the company. The
opening price at the auction is reported to be $8.6 billion,
but whoever buys it will have to pay $25 billion more to the
Russian government to cover the taxes. (Interfax)
This, say the financial analysts, will keep big U.S. oil
companies out of the bidding, and is expected to favor Russian
companies like Gazprom.
This whole struggle makes crystal clear what the Cold War
was all about. While Russian workers suffer staggering declines
in their quality of life, the U.S. imperialist ruling
class--great champions of freedom and democracy--are focused on
one thing: gaining control over the vast natural resour ces of
the former Soviet Union, which covered one-seventh of the
Earth's surface.
They succeeded in breaking up the USSR and now have not only
financial outposts but even soldiers and bases in a number of
the former Soviet republics, especially those around the
oil-and-gas-rich Caspian Sea. But the big prize is Russia, with
its huge area, much of it unexploited, stretching from Europe
to the Pacific.
Looking ahead, it is completely predictable that the kind of
imperialist arrogance shown in the Yukos affair will help to
rekindle not just a bourgeois nationalism in Russia, but a
working-class internationalism that unites all peoples against
the moneyed class, whose appetite to exploit labor knows no
limits.
Reprinted from the Dec. 9, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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