Yukos

Yukos was a creature of the chaotic Russian 1990s — stitched together from Soviet oil assets and handed, for a fraction of its worth, to Mikhail Khodorkovsky in the loans-for-shares scheme that minted the oligarchs. Under him it became a genuinely modern oil major, the largest producer in Russia, pumping a fifth of the country’s oil, and for a moment its most valuable company. Khodorkovsky became the richest man in Russia and, fatally, began to act like a political force independent of the Kremlin: funding opposition parties, denouncing official corruption in front of Putin, and negotiating to bring a Western supermajor into Russian oil.

The state’s response is the clearest case in this wing of a dominant company killed not by the market but by power. Khodorkovsky was arrested in October 2003; tax authorities then assessed roughly $27 billion in back taxes — a bill larger, in at least one year, than the company’s revenue — and froze its assets. In December 2004 its main production unit, Yuganskneftegaz, was auctioned to an unknown shell company capitalised at a few hundred dollars, which the state oil company Rosneft swallowed within two weeks. Bankruptcy followed in 2006, the rest of the assets went the same way, and in November 2007 Yukos was struck from the register. A 2014 international arbitration ruled the whole exercise an expropriation and ordered Russia to pay former shareholders some $50 billion — a judgment fought over to this day, but for the company itself it came years too late.