SOS management

Yesterday the deadline for submitting proposals for candidates to the new board of directors of YUKOS, which will be considered at an extraordinary meeting of shareholders on January 13, expired. According to Kommersant's information, the company never received any proposals from either its main shareholder, Group MENATEP, or from the government (YUKOS management considered this possibility). Thus, a meeting of the company's board of directors scheduled for today may cancel the January meeting of shareholders. In this situation, YUKOS can stop operating without declaring bankruptcy. There will be no one to manage it: most of the members of the current board of directors are demanding that its powers be removed, and the company’s top management is hiding abroad from possible claims from the Prosecutor General’s Office.

Personnel crisis

Let us recall that on November 16, the YUKOS board of directors scheduled an extraordinary meeting of shareholders for January 13, the agenda of which included the issue of early termination of powers of the current members of the company’s board of directors and the selection of new board members. Proposals for candidates to the new board of directors must be submitted by December 14. No later than today, the council must meet and approve the list of candidates for voting at the meeting.

The chairman of the board of directors of YUKOS, Viktor Gerashchenko, commented on this decision to Kommersant: “Foreign members of the board of directors (seven out of eleven.—Kommersant) completely lost faith in the future fate of YUKOS and raised the question of early termination of powers. Well, since he was elected at the meeting of cumulative shareholders by voting, he can only leave as a whole, and not one person at a time. If we do not receive a single proposal, then the meeting will not take place. But without new candidates, it is impossible to terminate the powers of the old ones.”

Tim Osborne, managing director of Group MENATEP, the main shareholder of YUKOS (among its co-owners are the defendants Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Platon Lebedev and those hiding from the Prosecutor General's Office in Israel Leonid Nevzlin and Mikhail Brudno), told Kommersant yesterday afternoon that the group did not submit candidates to the board of directors. “At the moment, we are closely monitoring all the circumstances surrounding the sale of Yuganskneftegaz, and our decision on introducing candidates to the board of directors of Yukos will largely depend on how the situation with the sale of this company develops,” says Mr. Osborne. According to Kommersant's sources in YUKOS, at the time the issue went to press, the company had not received any proposals for candidates to the board of directors.

Apparently, this scenario suits the management and the majority of members of the board of directors of YUKOS. Back in November, Stephen Theede, chairman of the board of YUKOS-Moscow LLC, said at an online conference that YUKOS invites government officials to nominate their candidates for election to the company's board of directors. If by December 14 the government does not express a desire to participate in the management of Yukos, the company's shareholders at a meeting on December 20 (the day after the Yuganskneftegaz auction) will recommend that managers file for bankruptcy. The court will have to consider this application within five days, and if it is satisfied, the management and board of directors of YUKOS will automatically resign.

However, it remains unclear what mechanism Yukos offered to the government so that one of its representatives could join the board of directors. None of the government organizations is a shareholder of YUKOS, and accordingly, it cannot nominate its candidates. At the same time, both Stephen Theede and Viktor Gerashchenko have repeatedly stated that the oil company, despite all its desires, is unable to have any dialogue with the authorities.

Bankruptcy is inevitable

The fact that the bankruptcy of YUKOS is a finally resolved issue became clear from another statement by Tim Osborne, which he made in the evening to the Reuters news agency. “If the vote (December 20.—Kommersant) takes place, then we will transfer our powers to Stephen Theede, who is returning (from London.—Kommersant) to the meeting,” said the managing director of Group MENATEP. “If Yuganskneftegaz leaves for $10 billion (his The starting price at the auction is $8.6 billion—Kommersant), I don’t think there is any other solution than declaring the company bankrupt.”

However, according to him, the December meeting of shareholders may not take place. It is likely that YUKOS's registrar, the M-Reestr company, will be absent from the meeting. According to Tim Osborne, “the Russian government is trying to put pressure on the registrar so that he does not appear at the meeting, so it will not be possible to officially vote” (Kommersant wrote about this scenario on December 3).

There will certainly be buyers for the property that will remain with YUKOS after the sale of Yuganskneftegaz. Regardless of whether the authorities will allow the company's shareholders to make a decision on its bankruptcy or not. Former deputy chairman of the board of MENATEP bank and president of the Open Economy Institute, Konstantin Kagalovsky, told Kommersant yesterday that the investment consortium he heads has sent a proposal to purchase those YUKOS assets that will remain with him after December 19. However, he refused to say to whom exactly this proposal was sent and who are the participants in the consortium. Let us note that for the first time Mr. Kagalovsky announced the consortium’s desire to acquire a controlling stake in YUKOS in July. He never received an answer from either YUKOS or the authorities.

It seems that Yukos already understands that the company will cease to exist within the next month. According to Reuters, YUKOS is not included in the preliminary January schedule for pumping oil for export through the Transneft pipeline system to the ports of Primorsk and Novorossiysk. Every month YUKOS exports 700 thousand tons of oil through both ports. According to unofficial information, there are no applications from YUKOS for the supply of oil by rail to the port of Murmansk in January.

Vice President of Transneft Sergei Grigoriev told Kommersant that he does not have such information, but if it is true, it is only because YUKOS itself has not submitted an application for export. “The volumes necessary for Yukos’s export supplies were reserved for it by Transneft,” noted Mr. Grigoriev.

Kommersant will monitor developments.

PETER Kommersant-SAPOZHNIKOV, EVGENY Kommersant-Khvostik

YUKOS has become uncontrollable