The Gazprom guys are slick operators. Their scheme for siphoning off billions is dead simple, and that’s what makes it so elegant.
Any asset lined up to be ripped off gets moved out of Gazprom and into Gazprombank, and from there it can be carved up however they like. Formally, it all still seems to be within Gazprom—Gazprom owns Gazprombank. But if I, as a Gazprom shareholder, ask questions about Gazprombank, they’ll tell me to get lost—supposedly it’s a different legal entity. Everything was bought with Gazprom’s money, and therefore with mine too, as a shareholder, but I have no way of finding out what happened to those purchases—Gazprom says it doesn’t have the documents. Everyone remembers how much money Gazprom poured into media assets—NTV (a major Russian TV network), Rutube, and the like. But now none of it supposedly belongs to Gazprom anymore, precisely because of this scheme. It’s the same story with Sibur. The country’s largest petrochemical holding company supposedly belongs to Gazprom, and yet somehow it also doesn’t. You can’t reliably find out what exactly they’re cooking up with the sale of Sibur. Or rather, the basic principle is clear—it’s always the same: they want to steal it, but the details are hard to uncover. At one point, five some young punks were supposedly going to buy it from Gazprom using Gazprom’s own money. Now the deal seems to have been put on hold, but for how long? There’s only one thing I care about: will the day ever come when all these people end up behind bars?