Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday fiercely defended the state's purchase of Yukos's main production unit. He called it the legal reversal of the shady privatisaions of the 1990s, which saw a few tycoons buy most of Russia's industrial jewels on the cheap.
Yukos, which was Russia's biggest oil firm, has vowed to sue the government and anyone who deals with Yuganskneftegaz, the Yukos subsidiary that was sold last Sunday to help pay tax arrears of $27 billion (€20 billion) that the firm allegedly owes to the state.
Yuganskneftegaz was bought by an unknown firm, Baikal Finance Group, for $9.3 billion - half of what most analysts say it is worth.
Baikal was itself bought this week for an undisclosed sum by Rosneft, a state oil firm whose chairman, Mr Igor Sechin, is a long-time ally of Mr Putin's and is also the Kremlin's deputy chief-of-staff.
Rosneft's purchase of Yuganskneftegaz will turn it into a world player on the energy market, with production of 1.45 million barrels per day, almost as much as OPEC member Libya.
"Rosneft, which is de facto 100 per cent state-owned, bought Yuganskneftegaz. I think everything was done by market methods," Mr Putin told his annual Kremlin news conference.
"You all know very well how privatisation was carried out here at the beginning of the 1990s. And how people were using different tricks, which included breaking laws then in force, in order to acquire state property. Well today the state - using absolutely legal, market mechanisms - is ensuring its own interests."
Critics of Mr Putin say his allies launched the crackdown on Yukos in order to crush its influential founder, Mr Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and to rein in the ambitions of his fellow "oligarchs" while reasserting state control over strategic sectors of the economy.
Mr Khodorkovsky, a Kremlin critic who faces a decade in jail on fraud and tax evasion charges, was the richest of a coterie of tycoons who used political contacts and business savvy to build shadowy empires in the early 1990s. They then bankrolled the re-election of President Boris Yeltsin in 1996 and, in return, received effective carte blanche to divide Russia's best oil and metals assets among themselves.
The sale of Yuganskneftegaz went ahead despite a barring order from a court in Houston, Texas, but Yukos said legal action could still scupper the deal.
"Yukos confirms that it will use all legal means to dispute this illegal deal in the interests of the tens of thousands of shareholders in the oil company," said the company's spokesman, Mr Alexander Shadrin.
State gas monopoly Gazprom, which was the favourite to win the Yuganskneftegaz auction, could still get its hands on Yukos's crown jewel: it said this week that plans to merge with Rosneft were still on track.
