The robbers' most fervent wish is to become barons. Their erstwhile, less exalted, criminal friends are on the way. Expect a bloodbath, a genuine mafia gangland war over territory and spoils. The result is by no means guaranteed.
The Energy Sector
The pension fund of the Russian oil giant, Lukoil, a minority shareholder in TV-6 (owned by a discredited and self-exiled Yeltsin-era oligarch, Boris Berezovsky), this week forced the closure of this television station on legal grounds. Gazprom (Russia's natural gas monopoly) has done the same to another television station, NTV, last year (and then proceeded to expropriate it from its owner, Vladimir Gusinsky).
Gazprom is forced to sell natural gas to Russian consumers at 10% the world price and to turn a blind eye to debts owed it by Kremlin favorites.
Both Lukoil and Gazprom are, therefore, used by the Kremlin as instruments of domestic policy.
But Russian energy companies are also used as instruments of foreign policy.
A few examples:
Russia has resumed oil drilling and exploration in war ravaged
Chechnya. About 230 million rubles have been transferred to the federal
Ministry of Energy. A new refinery is in the works.
Russia lately signed a production agreement to develop oilfields in central Sudan in return for Sudanese arms purchases.
Armenia owes Itera, a Florida based, Gazprom related, oil concern, $35 million. Itera has agreed to postpone its planned reduction in gas supplies to the struggling republic to February 11.