(Source: NYTimes) Russia says it will go ahead with an auction to sell the key asset of embattled oil company Yukos despite a U.S. bankruptcy court decision to block it for several days. Russia's state-controlled gas monopoly, Gazprom, expected to win the auction whose starting price is $8.5 billion, said it would participate despite the U.S. court decision to block it for 10 days.

 

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(Source: ITAR-TASS) LONDON, February 13 (Itar-Tass) -- Russias presidential candidate Ivan Rybkin has appeared at a news conference on Friday to say he had stayed in Kiev for four days in an unconscious condition.

 

I was lured into a trap. I had been told I would meet with Aslan Maskhadov. Instead I was kidnapped and drugged. I have no idea of who benefited from this. link

 

longer article (Kansas City)

(Source: Forbes) Russian oil giant Yukos has offered to pay one-third of the $3.4 billion the government says is due in back taxes and fines. The oil company said Wednesday the full amount could force it into bankruptcy.

 

The Moscow Arbitration Court upheld the tax claim against Russia's second-largest oil producer Monday. Yukos has warned that it doesn't have the cash to pay up front and could be driven to bankruptcy if a court order allowing it to sell its assets isn't lifted.

 

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(Source: CNN, Feb 9, 04) The mystery surrounding the disappearance of a Russian presidential candidate has deepened with the launch -- and then cancellation -- of a murder probe.

 

Rybkin's family and staff filed a missing persons report Sunday, and the FSB -- Russia's Federal Security Service -- launched an investigation.

 

On Monday morning, Moscow prosecutors announced a criminal case on charges of pre-meditated murder. But they canceled it almost immediately, saying there was "no basis" for such a case. link

 

(Source: Channelnewsasia) Russian opposition presidential candidate Ivan Rybkin has resurfaced in Kiev after going missing for five days, prompting fears that he may have been kidnapped or killed, his campaign office told AFP. link

"Let's make a deal" versus "be a legal entity subject to laws that the Kremlin is legally charged to protect and enforce"

 

(Source: Peter Lavelle) MOSCOW, June 15 (UPI) -- The lawyers are lawyering, the spin-doctors spinning, and an embattled Russian oil giant is fighting for its life as a privately own company.

 

For a good part of a year, when the "Yukos affair" started with the arrest of a Yukos core shareholder, thousands of press releases, brokerage reports, and intense media coverage have attempted to convey what is at stake for Russia's economy and the type of regime Vladimir Putin is creating. However, for all the theories aired and impassionate pleads voiced, the struggle surrounding Yukos is about a clash of cultures - and the victor in this clash has been obvious since the start. link

(Source: CNN, Feb 6, 2004) MOSCOW, Russia (CNN) -- Russian officials have opened a terrorism investigation into an underground explosion on a Moscow metro train that killed at least 22 people and wounded more than 70 others, according to the Ministry of Emergency Situations. link

(Source The Guardian, July 5, 2004) Yukos, the Russian oil giant, today lurched closer to bankruptcy as a group of creditors declared the company in default on $1bn (£545.7m) of loans.

 

The notification came from a syndicate of banks, led by France's Société Générale, that had lent Yukos the money in September, the company said. Alexander Shadrin, a Yukos spokesman, told the Interfax news agency that the company received the notification on Friday evening demanding that it quickly clear the debt.

 

"On July 2, we received the default notice from the banks which helped us organise the $1bn loan," Mr Shadrin told Reuters. link

(Source: Peter Lavelle) MOSCOW, July 2 (UPI) -- The Communist Party of the Russian Federation openly split into two warring factions on Thursday.

 

Gennady Zyuganov, founder and long-time leader of the post-Soviet Communist Party, known by the acronym KPRF, lost his post along with his key aids. Conflict within the party had been brewing since the KPRF experienced a devastating electoral defeat in Russia's parliamentary vote last December. However, it remains an open question whether a new party leadership can change the KPRF's waning political fortunes. link

Once again Peter Lavelle wrote a nice analysis.

 

Russia's Bailiff Service Tuesday issued a statement of its intention to sell Yuganskneftegaz, Yukos' largest subsidiary, to settle part of the oil giant's huge $3.4 billion tax obligation. This statement signals the rapid end of the "Yukos affair" and the complete transformation and ownership of what was Russia's largest privately owned company.

 

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Peter Lavelle has written a very interesting speculative article

 

Gazprom -- the world's largest natural gas company, which is controlled, but not completely owned by the Kremlin -- is expected to have its share-ownership structure investigated. The government says the purpose is to determine whether foreigners illegally own Gazprom shares. However, the outcome may see the Kremlin getting a much larger chunk of Gazprom. ...

 

(Source: NYTimes) A Chinese official said yesterday that Beijing was interested in buying the prize asset of Yukos, the Russian oil company on the brink of collapse. A successful bid from China, which needs to ensure its oil supply, would mean one of Russia's most important businesses being renationalized, albeit by another country.

 

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(William Safire, Feb 2, 2004, NYT) ntelligence shortcomings, as we see, have a thousand fathers; secret intelligence triumphs are orphans. Here is the unremarked story of "the Farewell dossier": how a C.I.A. campaign of computer sabotage resulting in a huge explosion in Siberia all engineered by a mild-mannered economist named Gus Weiss helped us win the cold war.

 

Weiss worked down the hall from me in the Nixon administration. In early 1974, he wrote a report on Soviet advances in technology through purchasing and copying that led the beleaguered president détente notwithstanding to place restrictions on the export of computers and software to the U.S.S.R.

 

Seven years later, we learned how the K.G.B. responded. I was writing a series of hard-line columns denouncing the financial backing being given Moscow by Germany and Britain for a major natural gas pipeline from Siberia to Europe. That project would give control of European energy supplies to the Communists, as well as generate $8 billion a year to support Soviet computer and satellite research. link