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High comedy continued on Monday, as Russian officials stonewalled on the new owner of Russian oil giant Yukos' assets.
The previously unknown Baikal Finance Group won the assets at an auction on Sunday when their principal rival, Gazprom, made a phone bid and was evidently ordered not to make a higher bid. Baikal's winning bid was about half analysts' estimates of the assets' actual worth.
So who's Baikal? Well, the company is registered in Tver, a city 100 miles northwest of Moscow, at 12 B Novotorzhskaya Street. Reporters going to that address discovered a 3-story building constructed before the (1917) Russian revolution. The only things located on the first floor were London café, Dionis liquor store and Volga grocery store.
An employee at the bar, Valentina Vasilieva, said in an interview there wasn't even a sign for Baikal in the building and she never counted any oil tycoons among her clientele. "We would immediately have noticed them," she said, according to the Wall Street Journal
According to the BBC World Service, there's another angle that almost
guarantees that Yukos' assets will soon be completely owned by the
Kremlin. Yukos' major creditor is the Kremlin, thanks to huge tax
assessments levied against the company. Baikal has 14 days to come
up with the $9.4 billion that it bid, and if it fails, then Russian
law says that its assets will go to the largest creditor - the
Kremlin. So it's possible that Baikal is simply an empty shell
company with no money, set up as a ruse to nationalize Yukos.
(20-Dec-04)
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