← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Centinel
Thread ID: 10792 | Posts: 5 | Started: 2003-10-28
2003-10-28 06:40 | User Profile
Moscow Times: [url]http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2003/10/28/042.html[/url]
American Takes Yukos Helm
By Simon Ostrovsky Staff Writer October 28, 2003
How did an American end up at the helm of Russia's largest and most politically active company?
It all began with a war of attrition.
Just two years ago, as a vice president of U.S. oil major ConocoPhillips, Steven Theede was locked in battle with Yukos over legislation that would have made it easier for his company to operate in Russia.
But he buried the hatchet with his former foe in August by becoming Yukos' chief operating officer.
Now, after the weekend arrest and detention of CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the abdication Monday of Vasily Shakhnovsky -- who resigned as president of Yukos-Moskva, the oil giant's main strategic center, to become a senator from the remote region of Evenkia -- Theede has found himself in charge of the $24 billion -- and shrinking -- company.
With the resignation of Shakhnovsky, who was charged last week with evading nearly $1 million in taxes and ordered not to leave Moscow, Yukos has expanded Theede's responsibilities.
He now is essentially CEO, COO and senior vice president of Yukos, as well as president of its most important subsidiary, which is the company's main hive of planning for production and financial strategies.
"As the title chief operating officer denotes, it is only logical for this person to be put in charge of the company's operations at this time," Yukos spokesman Hugo Erikssen said.
Analysts said the relatively unknown 30-year industry veteran is a natural choice to assume official control of the company now that Khodorkovsky is out of action indefinitely.
"Since we've had outspoken threats from the government, Yukos appears to have had a plan to allow its day-to-day operations to continue," Renaissance Capital energy analyst Adam Landes said. "I believe Theede's appointment is representative of this situation. He is one of the more mature foreigners with the most extensive operating experience the company employs."
Theede's vault into the acting CEO position at Yukos did not seem a likely event two years ago. As Conoco vice president, Theede locked horns with Khodorkovsky over production-sharing agreement legislation designed to give foreign companies investment incentives by offering them tax breaks and clear operating rights.
In 2001, as Conoco ran into a double whammy of PSA-related problems that threatened to freeze its two Russian projects, Theede lashed out at what he described "an influential lobby," which, he said, was "interested in delaying the process of production-sharing legitimization."
Without a move by the Russian government to give the go-ahead to more PSAs, Conoco could not start developing its Northern Territories Pipeline Project.
In the meantime, as the government mulled a change in policy, its existing PSA for the Polar Lights venture in the Nenets autonomous region was facing a legal challenge from a local governor.
Many industry players saw Khodorkovsky as being behind the lobby that was putting the brakes on PSAs.
Khodorkovsky often openly said he believed PSAs gave foreign companies an unfair advantage on Russia's oil patch. He advised foreign investors not to expect tax breaks through PSAs and said they should buy Russian companies instead and invest in the market on equal terms with domestic players.
Since then, however, Theede and Khodorkovsky appear to have put their differences behind them.
Apart from Theede, other Yukos managers are moving up to take a more important role in the company while Khodorkovsky sits in jail.
Yukos chief financial officer Bruce Misamore, who is also an American, said he saw the company's board of directors, particularly board chairman Simon Kukes, taking a more active role in the company during Khodorkovsky's absence, Dow Jones reported.
The Kansas-born 51-year-old Theede graduated from Kansas State University in 1974 with a degree in mechanical engineering. From 1974, Conoco employed him in a variety of management positions.
Before going to Yukos, Theede was president of exploration and production in Europe, Russia and the Caspian for ConocoPhillips.
2003-10-28 13:35 | User Profile
Oh and Tex said I was being paranoid and ridiculas if I said Americans were partially responsible for whats going on in Russia.
2003-11-02 14:57 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Centinel]Moscow Times: American Takes Yukos Helm by Simon Ostrovsky [/QUOTE]
Meanwhile.....
[url]http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1066565520471[/url]
Financial Times
Mystery figure outside Russia takes control of Yukos chief's shares By Andrew Jack in Moscow Published: October 31 2003 4:00 | Last Updated: October 31 2003 4:00
A mystery man based outside Russia has taken control of most of Mikhail Khodorkovsky's shares in Yukos, in a move designed to safeguard his assets from confiscation and permit negotiations with potential strategic buyers in the oil sector.
Advisers to the group indicated that another shareholder of the Gibraltar-based Menatep Group, through which Mr Khodorkovsky and his partners held their Yukos stakes, has control of the estimated 22 per cent of shares formerly held by Mr Khodorkovsky.
They indicated that he was now abroad, suggesting that it is Leonid Nevzlin, Mr Khodorkovsky's former point-man for government relations, and who has an 8 per cent stake in Menatep.
Mr Nevzlin fled Russia during August, initially on an extended holiday, after indications that he might come under attack by prosecutors. He has since applied for Israeli citizenship.
When Yukos made Russian corporate history last year by publishing a short but explosive document detailing its ultimate ownership structure via Menatep, most readers concentrated on the second page, which revealed the true wealth of Mr Khodorkovsky and his partners.
They showed that Mr Khodorkovsky owned 9.5 per cent directly of Menatep, and a further 50 per cent through a trust. His key partners include Platon Lebedev and Vasily Shakhnovsky, both with 7 per cent each, and both of whom have, like Mr Khodorkovsky, been charged by prosecutors.
It was a more obscure reference on the final page that now seems far more relevant today, however: in the event of Mr Khodorkovsky's "inability to act as a beneficiary" through events including imprisonment, it stated that voting rights on most of his shares would pass to another person.
In fact, a key adviser yesterday indicated that the beneficial ownership of the shares had also passed out of Mr Khodorkovsky's hands to that same person, who is now based outside Russia, shielded from the escalating judicial battle. He is also believed to hold the voting rights on the shares previously held by Mr Lebedev.
That will prove a key test as lawyers attempt to recover the value of shares frozen yesterday by prosecutors, and international energy companies potentially interested in acquiring a strategic stake in Yukos contemplate whether their deal can still go ahead.
The document shows that a 61 per cent stake in Yukos - since diluted to 55 per cent under the first stage of its merger plan with its rival Sibneft - is held via Menatep via two other offshore companies: Yukos Universal and Hulley Enterprises.
Technically, the authorities have only prevented the sale of the frozen Yukos shares with yesterday's court order. The owners are still allowed to vote and receive dividends.
However, Menatep said the shares no longer legally belonged to Mr Khodorkovsky, and it would probably challenge the decision in Russian and foreign courts.
Note: There is another thread on this subject in Current Events - [url]http://forums.originaldissent.com/showthread.php?t=10886[/url]
2003-11-04 13:28 | User Profile
Amazing story.
2003-11-05 00:30 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Ed Toner]Amazing story.[/QUOTE]
THE HOFFMAN WIRE Michael A. Hoffman II, Editor Nov. 4, 2003 (Supplement)
PUTIN: PLAYER OR PATRIOT?
From a Hoffman Wire reader:
Dear Mr. Hoffman
Re: Hoffman Wire: "That Poor, Persecuted Billioniare"
This is nothing more than a turf war between Putin's gang and the mostly Jewish oligarch/Oil-garchy apparatus.
The deal is supposed to be that the Russian government lets these crooks keep their stolen loot if they stay out of politics. That is all Putin, who is the murderer of the Chechens and Sharon and Netanyahu's friend, cares about. The Internationalist Putin is not a patriot, he is an opportunist. Khodorkovsky probably struck a deal to avoid being prosecuted by resigning from his official position at Yukos.
Hoffman replies:
I hope I have not stated somewhere that the Machiavellian chess player and former KGB colonel, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, is a "patriot." Rather, he is a power-broker who wishes to retain power in the face of the onslaught of a particular moneyed juggernaut led by Zionist personnel, and to do so he is appealing to the patriotic aspirations of the Russian people, who are still of peasant stock and who view the extremely wealthy segment of their society with a jaundiced eye, much like the farmers of America once did, in the days of the Early Republic, when they formed "mechanics and farmers" unions to differentiate themselves from those "parasites" who they identified as lawyers and bankers living off the honest labor of others.
These churlish ideals (I use churl here in the strictly denotative, Saxon common law sense of a country freeman), survived in America until the eve of World War Two. Not to put too fine a point on it, in the 1930s, Henry Ford just barely kept the seething white work force on his assembly lines from lynching him.
In early America these convictions boiled over into Shays' Rebellion and the Anti-Masonic Party, which has the distinction of having convened the first national political party convention in American history. The mechanic-farmer yeomanry were ritually denounced in the 1960s in Richard Hofstadter's influential history as "The Paranoid Style in American Politics."
The Russian people, though raped and nearly ruined by 70 years of Bolshevism, still retain a spark of peasant lucidity and cunning, and from out of that discontent and unrest, Putin draws his constituency. Don't be so naive as to think that God only uses boy scouts to accomplish His work. Satan does God's work in the Book of Job; and Christopher Marlowe expressed this paradox in his drama "Doctor Faustus," by describing the devil Mephistopheles as he who desires evil but inexplicably brings about good.
I submit that Putin would like to take all of the ill-gotten gain of the Zionist-Russian billionaires. The "deal" about staying out of politics was cut only because he could not at that time, seize their purloined assets.
I would not regard Putin as a friend of the Russian-Zionist Ariel Sharon. They are two scorpions dancing around each other on a petrie dish; a most intriguing mazurka to observe.
Some of the cynicism about the likelihood of reform of the world coming out of Russia is based on a whole school of right-wing disinformation about Russia as the font of evil in the world, and dismissive of Russia's traditional pre-Bolshevik position within Christendom as "Holy Mother Russia," the citadel of Christian peasant piety and fervor immortalized by Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy.
Do you play chess? It's the national sport in Russia; sadly neglected here. Putin is a pawn, yes, but of the kind that can pin a knight and make himself the most powerful piece on the board on the eighth rank. He may be Icarus or he may not be, it depends on what competing faction within the Cryptocracy is backing him. Let's have some fun and code-name that faction, "Mephistopheles," as we savor that rarest of spectacles, the salubrious sight of a billionaire Zionist crook behind bars!
For further study: THE PROP-MASTERS by Michael A. Hoffman II [url]http://www.hoffman-info.com/communist.html[/url]