Times change, however, and it now seems
that we should be writing about Yugansk more often. Next
Sunday's auction of Yukos' core production unit will be
a new beginning, not a terrible end. When Mikhail
Khodorkovsky gets out of jail in 20 years or so -- he
will get out someday, won't he? -- he will demand the
return of his assets. You might think his demands would
fall on deaf ears, but he will find plenty of people
willing to listen. And not out of some abstract sense of
fairness, but because even 20 years down the road there
will be plenty of people convinced that they got a raw
deal back in 2004. Judges, legislators, journalists and
deputy heads of the presidential administration will
rally around the former owner of Yukos.
If the fines for the possession of
illegal property are calculated as creatively as they
have been in the Yukos affair -- and laws could change
just as easily in the future as they do now -- Gazprom
itself could be up for grabs. And if that happens,
anyone who's still around would be crazy not to get on
board with Khodorkovsky.
The arrest of Yukos' top executives last
year may have disrupted the fragile balance in society,
but the upcoming Yugansk auction will lay a firm
foundation for an endless series of property disputes
and redistribution.
The market understands perfectly well
that Gazprom is not just the only real player in this
auction, but that it is also the only possible buyer. If
the world's top oil companies, which have been dealing
with retrograde regimes from Baghdad to Tripoli for
decades, are not making a play for the choicest Russian
assets, this means that they view these assets as
tainted.
For Gazprom, the lack of serious
competition can only be a good thing, since it will keep
the sale price down. And if the assets have to be
returned someday, the company's current executives won't
be the ones to suffer. If anyone decides to challenge
the sale in a foreign court, we -- i.e., the president,
Russia, Gazprom -- will simply reply that since we
acquiesced in the election of Viktor Yushchenko, we're
not going to entertain any further claims this year.
If we're going to talk about the endless
redistribution of property we could bring up a number of
other events from the past week, such as the $158
million tax claim against No. 2 mobile phone operator
VimpelCom. (I still don't quite understand how Gazprom
will fare in the mobile phone business, but I'm sure
they'll figure something out.) Owners of major
businesses have a right to a private life, of course. If
they don't want the whole world to know the details of
how they're being stripped of their assets and thrown in
jail, so be it. We can always write about something
else. About the future of Yugansk, for example.
Konstantin Sonin is an assistant
professor at the New Economic School/CEFIR.
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