Oil Price and Politics

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Originally Posted by Stavros

Yes, but isn't Khodorkovsky one of the kleptocrats? (There used to be a 'Kleptocracy Tour' in London).

Like Vladimir Potanin and some others, Khodorkovsky was a Communist. Though his parents were dissidents, albeit too scared to be active, and shielded their son from their true beliefs, Mikhail not only joined the Komsomol at University, he worked for them on graduation. Putin probably joined the KGB before the Party, I doubt one could be member of one and not the other, but not sure. The deeper question thus, other than their Communist pasts, is: what happened to the money?

Khodorkovsky was warned by Putin not to get involved in politics but did it anyway, and lost his oil company -and when Putin 're-structured' the ownership and shares in Russia's petroleum companies, including those which had to bring in Exxon, Shell and BP in 1991 because the Russian/Soviet industry was 20 years or more behind the rest of the world, who was the major beneficiary, if it was not the life-long Communist Vladimir Putin?

And as Khodorkovsky languishes in exile from Russia, is he living on benefits? No, because though Putin froze his wealth assesed at around $15 billion, he now finds himself in London down to his last $100-250 million, hard times indeed.

Consider that Two-thirds of the weallth of Ukraine left the country as their venal oligarchs voted with their dollars, and bankrupted their homeland. One of the most venal and corrupt men in the Ukraine just happened to be the State Prosecutor Vikor Shokin who Joe Biden agitated against, much to the ire of the 45th President of the USA who has described Shokin as 'wronged man' (!). Not to mention Shokin's successor, Yuriy Lutsenko...but that is another thread.

Follow the money, and you end up in the Caribbean va Cyprus,; Florida, Manhattan, London and the Shires - Eaton Square in London is also known as 'Red Square', not withut reason (see Irish Times link below). And Khodorkovsky, let's just say that whatever he suffered in prison, he doesn't have to work again in this lifetime.

Irish Times in the oligarchs in London-
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/worl...ians-1.3438072

Poor old MK, down to his last $150m -?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...ia-richest-man

And the Boss?
https://www.occrp.org/en/putinandthe...e-putin-money/

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So I gather I can take that to mean that you have very little sympathy for Mikhail Khordorkovsky ,LOL!?

Haha -but, look at this way: not one of the men who acquired Russia's oil and gas assets knew about oil and gas or cared, they just knew it gave them access to billions of dollars. Same with the other industries, and in many cases, the men concerned had been part of the Soviet Union's apparatus and had a front-row seat at the auction. I understand that Khodorkovsky wanted to enter politics to offer something different from, maybe even more democratic than Putin, that is not the point.

There is an obvious comparison with an obvious question: does Bill Gates know anything about computing? Does George Soros know how money markets operate? Neither of them emerged from a rich family with an inheritance to spend, neither of them had their business handed to them at bargain basement prices by the Federal Government.

What is so stunning about the Oigarchs in Russa and the Ukraine is their lack of achievement, and their stunning indiffefrence to the men and women who built those countries and its assets; the wealth from which they shipped out to foreign banks -that so many were either communists in their youth or relied on Cmmunists for their wealth is the savage process that attended the last days of an experiment that began in October 1917, even if the Revolution and its consequences is now judged to have been a failure.

Wittgenstein, a man with little interest in wealth and possessons, once recommended to a student the parable by Tolstoy, 'How much land does a man require?'. It sums up the craven greed of men who have taken so much out of the country into which they have returned so little.