Daily Journal:

Russian metallurgists are now quite competitive, but they are experiencing a large shortage of coking coal, and Mechel is the largest owner of the company that mines and produces coking coal. But since Mechel is also a metallurgical company, according to press reports, it, withholding supplies to its competitors, provided coal for its own production and exported coal for which there is demand. I think that those who did not get this coal were able to convey this to the Prime Minister, and he reacted quite sharply. The association with YUKOS arose immediately because over the past five years, for the first time in the last five years, Putin took such a substantive approach to a specific company. As a rule, the Prime Minister does not deal with the affairs of specific industries, associations, or even holdings. And Putin, following the strategy of macroeconomics, took up microeconomics. This suggests that the government, already being the owner of a large number of companies, also wants to influence the economic processes in those companies where it is not the owner.

If Mechel really took advantage of its monopoly position and abused it, then perhaps the prime minister’s anger is justified. Such a fact should be the subject of investigation. There is simply no need to do it so spectacularly, and in general this should not be done by the prime minister, but by, say, the deputy head of the Federal Antimonopoly Service. And, of course, the current situation plays into the hands of those to whom Mechel refused to supply raw materials. But the essence of the story is that Putin and his team, who moved into the government from the Kremlin along with the head of the Administration and his deputy, are increasingly controlling the country’s largest companies, regardless of their form of ownership.

Purely theoretically, a repetition of the Yukos story cannot be ruled out. But there are still no political claims against Mechel, and in the story with YUKOS, in addition to business, politics played a serious role.