Exorcising the Ghost

Middle management of Rosneft will celebrate a housewarming in the former YUKOS building in September

State-owned Rosneft will move to the former Yukos building on Dubininskaya Street in Moscow in September. In the meantime, the new owners got rid of the main symbols of Mikhail Khodorkovsky's former empire - the logo on the roof and the large copper plate with the name of the YUKOS company attached to the central column in front of the main entrance to the building. Now there is a gaping void in its place, but, as one of the building’s workers assures, a new sign with the inscription “Rosneft” will appear there at the beginning of September. According to him, representatives of service personnel and a number of leading managers of Rosneft work in the building, and next month it is planned to transfer here many employees of the state company, who are currently located in rented buildings. However, as a Rosneft representative says, top managers will remain in the office on Sofiyskaya Embankment overlooking the Kremlin.

The YUKOS building was put up for auction in mid-May along with other Moscow real estate properties of the company. The auction for this lot was perhaps both the brightest and the longest in the history of the YUKOS sale. There were two bidders for the purchase - Rosneft and the unknown Prana LLC. The fight between them lasted more than three hours and ended with the victory of “Prana”. Moreover, the price of the lot managed to increase 4.5 times, from 22 to 100 billion rubles. ($3.9 billion). A little later, Rosneft bought most of the assets of this lot, but for $3.4 billion. Who was behind Prana, why was it necessary to increase the price so much and, most importantly, where did this company find more than $3.9 billion? free funds were not officially reported. It is possible that Rosneft itself participated in raising part of these funds. Indeed, according to its latest report, after this transaction, Prana owed Rosneft 26 billion rubles. (almost $1 billion).

Be that as it may, the state-owned company is now preparing to move. By August 1, all organizations that rented several floors from YUKOS during the year left the office on Dubininskaya. YUKOS bankruptcy manager Eduard Rebgun also left there and returned to his office on Zvenigorodskoe Highway.

Since last week, Rosneft began to actively renovate the office inside and out. She has repeatedly demonstrated that she is not afraid of the memory of YUKOS and does not intend to get rid of this name as soon as possible. The network of gas stations throughout the country bought by Rosneft during the May auctions still operate under the YUKOS brand. As its head Sergei Bogdanchikov said in June at a press conference dedicated to the company’s annual meeting, for a company that bought up most of YUKOS’s other more interesting assets and was therefore bogged down in multibillion-dollar debts, repainting gas stations is not the first necessity. “We are not going to rush in this matter. We will analyze them, and perhaps we will repaint some of them in the colors of our company by the end of this year, and we will redo some of them next year,” he said then. In early August, Rosneft bought, along with Yukos' transport assets, its brand for oils and other types of petroleum products. The company has not yet decided whether it will use them in the future. But Rosneft did not want to see the YUKOS brand on the building that it had acquired with such difficulty.

Anna GORSHKOVA