Wednesday, November 19, 2003

YUKOS OIL AND KHODORKOVSKY Green Left: "The richest person in Russia, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, has been arrested at gunpoint and sits in jail. Some US$14 billion worth of stocks he held in Yukos Oil - 44% of all shares in the company - were initially frozen by government prosecutors. The government of President Vladimir Putin has charged him with fraud, forgery and tax evasion dating from 1994 to 2001 - roughly the period in which he evolved from being a moderately rich man to becoming the biggest oligarch in Russia. Khodorkovsky had cultivated relations with top members of the US oil-banking-government cabal. An article in the November 1 New York Times entitled 'How Russian oil tycoon courted friends in US' says he met last summer with energy secretary Spencer Abraham; was at a dinner in Russia in September with former president George Bush senior; was close with the Carlyle Group, which had retained Bush senior as an advisor until a few weeks ago; has been a Sun Valley guest of former New Jersey senator Bill Bradley, who advises the Open Russia Foundation, funded by Khodorkovsky; put former secretary of state Henry Kissinger on the board of the foundation; and has given large donations to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the American Enterprise Institute. Khodorkovsky is the personification of the free-wheeling capitalists who became super-rich almost overnight with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Their immense wealth was stolen directly from the Soviet people, who had been the owners of the USSR's natural resources and means of production. When the industries, the mines, the oil wells, and the rest of the economy were opened up for privatisation, who wound up in possession of it all? Not the workers and farmers, who had been promised a fair share of the wealth in this new capitalist 'democracy'. Through every type of manipulation and fraud, the working people, the creators of all the wealth, were dispossessed and a handful of super-rich emerged in control of vast fortunes. Many of them were bankrolled from abroad. Yukos was the Russian stock most widely held among foreign investors. Khodorkovsky was the biggest, and is now the sixth, 'oligarch' to have been taken down." Some of the parties involved were quick to deny any 'official' links to Yukos Oil. The new manager, Simon Kukes, is a Russian-born American. That is clear enough. 11:21:34 AM

© Copyright 2003 Hetty Litjens.