YUKOS Scam: “Legal nihilism par excellence”
A year after Mikhail Khodorkovsky was arrested on fraud charges, Baikal Finance Group, a mysterious company with a share capital of only 10,000 rubles, acquired YUKOS largest subsidiary, Yuganskneftegaz, for $9.3 billion in an "auction" consisting of only one bidder.
After Yuganskneftegaz was sold four days later to state-controlled Rosneft, Andrei Illarionov, economic adviser to then-President Vladimir Putin, called the state expropriation of YUKOS "the Biggest Scam of the Year" in his annual year-end list of Russia's worst events. In a comment for The Moscow Times, Michael Bohm, the newspaper's opinion page editor, suggests that when Illarionov announced his 2009 list in late December, he should have added another award and given it to Putin: "the Best PR Project of the Decade."
Bohm writes that the YUKOS scam was "legal nihilism" par excellence, but most Russians have a completely different version of the event, due to the Kremlin's 180-degree PR spin. Putin claimed that the YUKOS Affair was not government expropriation at all, but a way to give money that YUKOS "stole from the people" back to the people by helping them buy new homes and repair old ones.
Few Russians know about the corruption allegations brought against Putin, nor do they know how many of Putin's friends were given CEO positions in Russia's largest corporations - nor would they believe any of this if they found out about it. Putin manipulates public opinion without the people having even the slightest inkling that they are being manipulated. The Kremlin spin doctors get top marks for creating Project Putin; he has built a PR fortress that is virtually impenetrable and can rest assured that he can keep pulling those levers for many years to come.