Londongrad by Mark Hollingsworth

Author:Mark Hollingsworth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2009-03-18T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

The Curse of Yukos

‘This wasn’t Mother Teresa versus Mike Tyson. These were two big tough guys at it with each other and one of them won. Putin won, Khodorkovsky lost, but it was a fair fight. He certainly didn’t deserve the pity of some type of political prisoner because all the things he did basically disallow him from claiming that’

- BILL BROWDER, Hermitage Capital Management1

WHEN BRITISH SECURITY consultants arrived at the Moscow headquarters of the Yukos oil company in late summer of 2003, they were shocked by its size, opulence, and almost military atmosphere. The ‘office’ turned out to be an imposing Victorian castle with huge bronze letters declaring its presence. It was surrounded by a tall, wrought-iron fence with sharp spikes and barbed wire and armed security guards patrolled the grounds.

As the consultants walked through the endless labyrinth of doors, rooms, and bunkers, it was as if they had entered the command and control HQ of a private army. After a bewildering number of corridors, they finally entered the private office of Leonid Nevzlin, Director of Corporate and Political Affairs at Yukos and a close confidant of its majority shareholder, Mikhail Khodorkovsky. There was a Zen-like atmosphere about the room: it was furnished with a single, plain white table, a plain rug and was minimally decorated.

Eventually, the thin, wiry, intense Nevzlin walked in wearing a designer suit with a black silk shirt. He was in a pensive, impatient mood. A month earlier the Prosecutor-General had announced the start of an investigation into Yukos. Within days the police had embarked on a series of heavy-handed raids on Yukos’s offices. Then, on 2 July 2003, Platon Lebedev, Khodorkovsky’s right-hand man and a major shareholder in Yukos, was arrested and hauled away in handcuffs. Over the next week arrest warrants were issued against a number of other executives.

Nevzlin was nervous that other senior executives would suffer the same fate as Lebedev. The British consultants had been called in to give advice on the security and protection of these key staff. Their immediate priority was a little-known 32-year-old executive named Ranil Burganov, a Director of a Yukos exploration company. Indeed, the Russian authorities had already accused Burganov of fraud relating to the Eastern Oil Company, a Yukos subsidiary, which consisted of stakes in six oil companies. The Russian police had earlier searched his house, interviewed his wife, and seized some of his assets. Within days he had been moved out of the country to Malta.

From that point, Yukos’s management moved rapidly. Around twelve other executives also fled Russia. Several went to Malta, some to Cyprus. This was merely an interim move. There was concern that these countries might comply with a Russian extradition request. London, in contrast, was considered a safe haven and a new plan was hatched to smuggle the Yukos employees from their Mediterranean hideaways into safe houses in the UK.

As the first individuals to be moved were hiding in Malta, the first phase of the clandestine operation was code-named Operation Maltesa 1.

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