Only a few visible traces of
Yukos Oil remain in Nefteyugansk, a remote Siberian town so inseparable from
Russia’s energy wealth that it has neft, or oil, in its name. Here and there, workers’ barracks, trucks and some aging equipment are still painted yellow and green, the color of Yukos’s logo.
The rest of what was once the most valuable subsidiary of the richest Russian company has new colors — black and gold — and a new owner, Rosneft.
President Vladimir V. Putin’s Kremlin has turned Rosneft, the once-forlorn state oil company, into an energy giant almost entirely, as it were, by giving Yukos’s assets a new coat of paint.
On Tuesday, a new phase in that effort begins with the auction of the company’s remaining assets following a declaration of bankruptcy forced by Rosneft.
The auction signals the final stage for Yukos, which is a few months from disappearing into Russia’s state energy industry, following a prosecutorial campaign that began nearly four years ago.
The auction also represents another milestone in Mr. Putin’s campaign to bring Russia’s energy resources under state control. It is being conducted, critics say, in a familiar pattern of Kremlin machinations where a formal, public and ostensibly legal process is accompanied by secretive negotiations where the Kremlin calls the shots. “This is just an illusion, an imitation of process,” Mr. Putin’s former prime minister, Mikhail M. Kasyanov, said in an interview.
First on the auction block is Yukos’s nearly 10 percent share in Rosneft, being offered at a sharply discounted starting price of $7.5 billion, roughly 12 percent below its market value.
Despite a late entry by BP, the winner is widely expected to be Rosneft, which is an organizer of the auction, as well as a bidder and the chief creditor, aside from the state.
The man liquidating Yukos’s assets, Eduard K. Rebgun, has applied to join Rosneft’s board of directors.
Christopher Weafer, chief analyst at Alfa Bank, said the outcome was virtually predetermined. He said the only way to prove that the true price of the Yukos assets had not been deflated to benefit Rosneft would be to hold “an open, fully transparent auction.”
Instead of that, Mr. Weafer said, the bidding is shaping up as a repeat of the wildly rigged auctions in the 1990s that tycoons like Mr. Khodorkovsky used to buy up state property and put together companies like Yukos in exactly the sort of transactions Mr. Putin and his supporters have railed against.
“They have managed to restrict it to those whom they want to win,” Mr. Weafer said. “It is a tried and trusted mechanism that Yukos developed and wielded itself.”
The auction’s first round is planned for Tuesday in Yukos’s headquarters, a nearly abandoned glass and stone high-rise overlooking Moscow’s Paveletsky train station. Once, Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, the former chairman who is now serving an eight-year prison sentence on charges of fraud and tax evasion that he disputed as politically motivated, had an office on the 17th floor.
Officials have described the process as a legal and fair, despite the criticisms. Mr. Rebgun has said the Yukos assets will be sold for about 30 percent less than their appraised value because they are distressed, in part because of the constraints of a court-ordered timeline to liquidate the property, the outstanding tax claims and environmental complaints raised by the state.
Yukos, though diminished, still has license to 2.3 billion barrels of oil reserves, pumps about 400,000 barrels of oil per day and owns five refineries, a network of gas stations and large stakes in the Russian state energy companies, obtained through share swaps before the bankruptcy. Those remaining Yukos assets are estimated to be worth more than $22 billion, more or less what the state and the company’s creditors say they are owed.
Mr. Khodorkovsky’s bank, Bank Menatep, bought Yukos for $300 million in a 1996 auction, one of a series of so-called loans-for-shares auctions that were at the center of criticism of privatization in the Russia in the 1990s.
Rosneft became what it is today after acquiring a controlling 76.69 percent share in Yuganskneftegaz in a murky auction that followed the state’s prosecution of Yukos for tax evasion. That sale was once described by one of Mr. Putin’s advisers, now retired, as “the theft of the century.”
The tax authorities seized it in lieu of back taxes against Yukos and auctioned it in December 2004 to an obscure company, Baikal Finans Group, for $9.35 billion, far below its market value, estimated at the time to be $14 billion to $22 billion. Rosneft in turn bought the subsidiary three days later. At today’s energy prices, it is worth far more, perhaps more than $60 billion, according to energy analysts. The Siberian field supplies refineries now owned by Yukos. If Rosneft wins a bid for these assets, as expected, most of the former Yukos will be reunited under state control.
Few doubt that Rosneft will win. In Russia’s politically supercharged energy industry, any other company wanting to bid would need a nod from the Kremlin first.
That explains why BP’s entry into the auction got a jaundiced reception from government critics. By Russian law, there must be at least two parties to an auction, and until BP entered the fray last week there was only Rosneft.
Just on Friday, the chief executive of BP, John Browne, and his designated successor at the company, Tony Hayward, met with Mr. Putin at the president’s summer home outside Moscow. A spokesman for BP, Robert Wine, said Monday that the meetings had been intended for Mr. Browne to introduce Mr. Hayward to Russian officials. He said he could not say whether the auction Tuesday was on the agenda.
On a recent excursion to Nefteyugansk that was organized by the company, Rosneft executives defended their management of the asset and the role of the state in business generally.
“We try to make sure our shareholders get the best dividends and value,” Sergei I. Kudryashov, Rosneft’s first vice president, said in a briefing for reporters. “There is no difference between us and any private companies, like BP or Exxon.”
He and others in Nefteyugansk highlighted the company’s investments since 2005 in a field that produces 1.1 million barrels per day. They portrayed themselves as good corporate citizens compared to Yukos, paying taxes and spending money on new buildings, like a swimming pool for a city, with a population of 114,000, that has few other public amenities.
“Since Day 1, we have had fruitful cooperation,” said Yuri Y. Alladin, the deputy mayor, whose boss, Sergei V. Burov, was an executive at Yukos and then at Rosneft in the subsidiary before being elected last year. “It wasn’t really stable cooperation before.”
The New York Times
