Kremlin targets oil magnate

last updated 8 January 2015

Moscow

Russian authorities have arrested several top employees and searched the offices of Yukos, the country’s largest oil producer, in what Russian analysts are calling a politically motivated attack. Analysts say the company is being targeted because billionaire CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russia’s richest man, has violated an unofficial pact between business tycoons and the Kremlin. When President Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000, he allowed the tycoons to keep the fortunes they amassed under the dubious privatization deals of the 1990s—as long as they agreed to stay out of politics. Khodorkovsky, though, has recently begun giving money to opposition parties. Putin aides “chose Yukos as their whipping boy,” said Aleksandr Privalov in the weekly Ekspert, “because it’s the richest and most ambitious company.”