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Russia's Justice Ministry gave Yukos more time to pay its back taxes, according to an announcement today.
This evidently puts on hold the Kremlin's plans to effectively nationalize Yukos by selling off its subsidiaries to Kremlin-controlled oil firms at extremely low prices.
It's most likely that Russian President Vladimir Putin backed down from the quick nationalization of Yukos because of the furious international reaction to his clumsy moves so far. Freezing Yukos' assets last week caused oil prices to spike to historic highs, and the threat to sell off its subsidiaries at fire sale prices has frightened investors. The Yukos story broke last year with the arrest of the company's CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and Russian stocks have fallen some 30% so far this year.
In the old Soviet days, the Kremlin could take any company's assets it pleased, with little fear of retribution. Today, Putin is feeling more and more hemmed in by a world that Russia's history has not prepared it for. The Yukos case reminds him that Russia today depends on international investors, and he has to play by their rules or lose their money.
Even more serious is the ten-year-old war in Chechnya, a clash
between Orthodox Christian and Muslim factions that has recently been
spreading throughout the Caucasus region to Russia's other southern
provinces, including Ingushetia, Dagestan, and North Ossetia, and to
other countries to the south, including Georgia, Armenia, and
Azerbaijan. History tells us that this region could ignite major
civil war within Russia itself, as happened in the 1920s, and Putin
is surely concerned about that.
(2-Aug-04)
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