Translated material
Yukos can go bankrupt in the coming days. Bush asks the "good friend" Putin to do something
Yukos can announce bankruptcy over the next few days, if the authorities do not reduce pressure on the company, the financial director of Yukos Bruce Mizamor said in an interview with the British newspaper The Financial Times .
According to him, "if we find ourselves insolvent due to the lack of cash to pay current bills, we will be forced to announce bankruptcy. I think that this is very likely."
Mizamor also said that the bailiffs are now taking half the monthly cash flow of Yukos, which is $ 1.8 billion.
For the first time, a statement was made that bankruptcy is not the biggest evil. Previously, Yukos managers hoped to continue work. In the current interview, Misamor said: "Bankruptcy is a good scenario if everything happens in accordance with the law."
In his opinion, the increase in oil prices, which the market participants partly associate with the indefinite situation around the Yukos, “gave the companies a little additional cash,” but this “is not fundamental for the current situation,” and by the middle of the month Yukos will lack funds.
Additional pressure is exerted by the creditors of the oil company that announced the default on loans. They have already begun to realize their right to return their funds from Yukos accounts and returned to date $ 40 million, and in the coming weeks this figure, most likely, could increase twice, said the release director.
According to ITAR-TASS, the leadership of the Yukos at the meeting last week examined the plan for reducing capital and operating costs, which can greatly affect oil production.
According to Mizamor, the company can reduce planned oil production growth indicators. In the past two weeks, important negotiations with the authorities have been held regarding the possibility of Yukos to receive a delay in paying tax claims, however, according to the release director, "there was no intelligible answer."
Meanwhile, in the 1st half of 2004, Yukos received a net loss of 77 billion 594 million 880 thousand rubles, while for the same period in 2003, a net profit was made 39 billion 588 million 761 thousand rubles. This is stated in the report of the company prepared according to Russian accounting standards.
Concerned to the record -highly high prices of oil in the year of the elections, President Bush in recent days has repeatedly turned through intermediaries to the person whom he calls the "my kind friend", President Vladimir Putin. The intermediaries asked the President of Russia to resolve a political shade of the crisis around the Russian oil giant Yukos for the stabilization of world energy markets, says the American The Washington Post , which is published by Inopressa .
Last weekend, the National Security Advisor Rice Rice called the head of the Putin administration to express concern with the influence of the crisis on world markets. On Thursday, the State Department publicly urged Russia to forget about "domestic political reasons" and solve the problem of Yukos. On Friday, the Minister of Energy Spencer Abraham called his Russian colleague, supporting this call, and report that the Minister of Trade Donald Evans intends to do the same.
It is not known what influence calls from America had. Putin did not speak for two months about Yukos, and his administration did not make public statements regarding the calls of Rice and Abraham, the American newspaper notes.
From an economic point of view of Russia, it is beneficial for Yukos to continue to extract and export oil. Russia derives tremendous benefits from the current unprecedentedly high oil prices and incur significant losses if Yukos stops production.
The director of the Russian Federal Agency for Energy Sergey Oganesyan last week told reporters that the cessation of the Yukos production would have dramatic consequences and added that he was trying to convince the government to defrost the accounts.
US representatives said that they were not trying to interfere in the criminal cases of oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his company, but expressed concern about how the case was being done. "From our point of view, non -compliance with the necessary procedure and the threat of the rights of a private company led to alertness in Russian and international business circles," said Adam Elley, spokeswoman for the State Department of State Department on Thursday.
Washington’s concern indicates that the war around the Yukos is reflected throughout the world. “It concerns everyone, it is already not only about Putin and Khodorkovsky,” says William Brighter, head of the Hermita Capital Management investment fund.
In the case of Russia, Bush is in conflict with one of the close foreign allies. Bush considers relations with Putin achievement of his foreign policy, after their first meeting, Bush said that he understood "his soul." Disagreements with Putin about the war in Iraq were short -term and were not personal.
But the Oktyabrsky arrest of Khodorkovsky concerned many American officials who considered it selective use of justice against the Kremlin’s political competitor, The Washington Post notes. The escalation of the offensive on Yukos this summer posed a problem on the agenda in Washington due to its influence on world oil prices.
On the other hand, US intervention can cause discontent in the Kremlin. “Applications regarding internal affairs are not welcome, and from time to time it creates problems with the image of the United States,” said Yevgeny Kozhokin, director of the Russian Institute for Strategic Research.
Although the Democrats candidate John Kerry once stated that foreign leaders are in private expressed his support, many local analysts believe that Putin does not fall into their number. He built constructive working relations with Bush, and his advisers privately claim that they want to save them.
From the point of view of the Russian political establishment, the Republicans have a more pragmatic attitude to Moscow than the Democrats, since they are not concerned about human rights, the defeat of independent media and the war in Chechnya. Therefore, the American newspaper explains, for Russia the current Bush administration is a much more convenient partner than Kerry.
Putin does not express such feelings openly, but recently made statements in which Bush supported twice against Kerry. During the June Summit of the Great Eight, the Russian president undertook to defend President Bush from criticism of the Iraqi war by the Democrats, although Russia opposed this war. Democrats, Putin said, “have no moral right” to criticize Bush, since “they pursued the same policy in Yugoslavia,” referring to NATO bombing in 1999, when Bill Clinton was president.
A few days later, when Bush was accused of exaggerating the connections between the deposited President Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda, Putin again entered the dispute. He told reporters in Kazakhstan that after September 11, 2001, Russian intelligence services provided the Americans "information that the official structures of the Saddam regime were preparing terrorist attacks" against the United States.
The second statement “was perhaps the best that a foreign leader could say to help Bush and not seem too straightforward,” said Boris Makarenko, an analyst at the private Moscow Center for Political Technology.
Putin is not so well -final when it comes to help in the energy sector. Although he and Bush in 2002 announced the beginning of the "energy dialogue", designed to connect the largest oil importer in the world with the second largest exporter, representatives of both sides acknowledge that the dialogue is not developing. It is interesting that it was Yukos that undertook to carry Russian oil in the United States with tankers.