Putin's Oil Heist - Episode 1: Putin's Plan

Thomas Fox - Compliance Evangelist
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“If you want to understand the story behind Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, you can draw a straight line back to the Yukos Affair.” The demise of Yukos, Russia’s second-biggest oil company, marked the first time Vladimir Putin tested the West, watching how the West would respond to seizing the company’s assets, Bruce Misamore says.

Putin’s Oil Heist is an insider’s account of the Yukos Affair. In this pilot episode, host Loren Steffy explores how it unfolded with first-person accounts from Misamore, its See more +

“If you want to understand the story behind Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, you can draw a straight line back to the Yukos Affair.” The demise of Yukos, Russia’s second-biggest oil company, marked the first time Vladimir Putin tested the West, watching how the West would respond to seizing the company’s assets, Bruce Misamore says.

Putin’s Oil Heist is an insider’s account of the Yukos Affair. In this pilot episode, host Loren Steffy explores how it unfolded with first-person accounts from Misamore, its former Chief Financial Treasurer.

Highlights of this podcast:

1. Bruce Misamore’s expectations when he went to Russia in the early 2000s. When Vladimir Putin rose to power, he was seen as someone who wanted to reform the Russian government and strengthen ties with the West. Bruce thought he’d be helping to modernize and establish new standards for Russian businesses to operate in the global market.

2. Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s rise to riches before being Misamore’s boss at Yukos. Khodorkovsky was a communist youth leader who started a business selling imported computers with some friends. With the money they made from the PC business, they started a bank, Menatep, and helped keep the Russian government afloat by buying assets from struggling state-owned businesses. Among the companies Menatep controlled was Yukos.

3. How did Misamore come to work for Yukos? By the year 2000, Khodorkovsky had positioned himself as the leading practitioner of normalized democratic capitalism in Russia and insisted on making Yukos more transparent by bringing in foreign directors to establish internationally recognized standards for the company’s operations. Despite Khodorkovsky’s reputation for questionable business dealings, Misamore felt that he was sincere in his passion for Yukos.

4. Yukos’ role as a model for Russian businesses in the global marketplace. It became the first Russian company to publish quarterly financial statements that adhered to the U.S. generally accepted accounting principles or GAAP. Yukos became Russia’s largest oil and gas company and the only large Russian company with no state ownership. They were the fastest-growing oil company globally by a rate of both percentage and actual production and the best performing international equity, both in emerging markets and the oil and gas markets. See less -

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