Forward from mart. PLEASE DISTRIBUTE ==================================== ----- Original Message ----- From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "NYTr List" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Saturday, December 11, 2004 2:53 PM Subject: [NYTr] Yukos: What Are 2 Yanks Doing Running a Russian Oil Co?
Via NY Transfer News Collective All the News that Doesn't Fit Workers World - Dec 9, 2004 issue http://www.workers.org/ww/2004/yukos1209.php 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 cr�me de la cr�me 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 prot�g�; 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 Council." 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 resources 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. =========================================== Search the NYTr Archives at: http://olm.blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/ To subscribe or unsubscribe or change your settings via the web, visit: http://olm.blythe-systems.com/mailman/listinfo/nytr NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ============================================= [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Make a clean sweep of pop-up ads. Yahoo! Companion Toolbar. Now with Pop-Up Blocker. 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