MOSCOW, August 4 (RIA Novosti). Alexei Golubovich, former Yukos director for strategic planning and corporate finance, told Izvestia about his experiences with the oil company.
Golubovich told the paper that Yukos managers had been preparing the company for sale.
"Yukos was clearly moving in this direction in the past few years," the ex-top manager told the popular daily in an interview.
He said shortly before the 1998 financial crisis Yukos managers had attempted to sell up to 25% of its shares to Phillips Petroleum (now part of ConocoPhillips).
"The sale of a large stake of up to 25% to a financially stronger rival is like losing your virginity," Golubovich said. "The buyer will ‘protect' you from dealing with other rivals and will most probably try to take over."
He said this did not happen in 1998 because the financial crisis disrupted the deal.
"The stake was offered for peanuts. As far as I know, Yukos was valued at $4 billion then," he said.
The ex-manager said it became clear after the crisis that the company was too expensive. No investors in Russia or the West wanted to buy a company valued at $15-$20 billion.
"Therefore, the decision to sell, if it was on the agenda, could not be made quickly. It entails not just pre-sale preparations, but a complicated scheme that may involve many intermediate deals," Golubovich said.
"I resigned in early 2001, and in late 2002 or early 2003 preparations were launched to sell the company to an unnamed American strategic investor," he said.
In his view, when the most complicated problems had been resolved after the 1998 crisis, "the company quickly became bureaucratized, with lots of personnel hired for pre-sale preparations."
"They were top professionals and upright people," he said. "But many in the company, including myself, thought that something was going wrong."
"Instead of developing business in the regions, the management devised complicated tax schemes, moving business from one region to another on paper, so as to pay taxes at lower local rates, and schemes based on ‘well fluids'."
According to the ex-manager, these tax schemes "could have been legal, but they were on the verge."
"This ‘original' tax planning, the addition of politics to business, and the general moral degradation of the staff encouraged resignations," Golubovich said.
He said the worse things were for Khodorkovsky, the better they were for Nevzlin.
"The worse [Mikhail] Khodorkovsky's situation is, the easier it is for [Leonid] Nevzlin to prove that he is a political refugee and another Nelson Mandela," the former top manager said.
He said the corporate security service had always had too much influence in Yukos.
"It collected files on the staff, including possibly on Khodorkovsky," Golubovich said. "A big company should have a security service, but there should be a limit to everything."
The service "was subordinate to Nevzlin, who had always been the number two man in Group Menatep and Yukos. He supervised the security and legal departments even when he was not formally on the company's staff." The ex-manager said, "He was responsible for public relations and could use all funds except for those set aside for production."
Golubovich said "hundreds of millions of dollars" were allocated every year on PR and security, but information about the security service's budget was not available.
"Only the service's heads knew who was responsible for what, and the documents were kept secret, just like in the CIA. They held them up for me to read," he said.
In addition to the security staff of enterprises, the service had 300-400 men in Moscow, which adds up to "about 25% of the Moscow staff of Yukos," Golubovich told the paper.
"Salaries have never been big in Yukos," he said. "It was probably the greediest big private company in Russia. Those who had worked with Khodorkovsky for a long time and were especially valuable were given not an option to buy shares but something like a stake in the business as a whole, including in Menatep."
At that time, it was "the biggest private owner" in Russia, said Golubovich, who was one of the six to receive a stake. "First he [Khodorkovsky] grabbed nearly 60% for himself, and then doled out 7% each to several employees, including [Leonid] Nevzlin, [Platon] Lebedev, [Mikhail] Brudno, [Vladimir] Dubov and me. [Vasily] Shakhnovsky was added to the group later," Golubovich said.
The transaction was formalized as the acquisition by each man of a small share in an offshore company. "By putting your signature to paper, you became the owner of a stake worth several thousand dollars in a giant company with a vast property portfolio," he said. "I was shocked how simple and routine the procedure was. But none of us saw our shares. Personally, I have never seen the Menatep shares assigned to me."
Golubovich said such doling out did not suit everyone (notably Nevzlin), which is why his name disappeared from the list of Menatep and Yukos owners shortly before it was made public.
The ex-manager said a black PR campaign had been conducted to tarnish his name him before that.
"It was done to convince him [Khodorkovsky] to exclude me from the list of shareholders," Golubovich said. After Khodorkovsky was arrested, the press wrote that Golubovich, Khodorkovsky and Lebedev "laundered money abroad, or avoided taxes."
"I think it was done to turn the heat up a little on Khodorkovsky, or to cut the number of potential claimants to gain control over his money abroad. And there was a lot of money left," he said. He said Nevzlin was most probably involved.
The ex-manager said Khodorkovsky's system of property governance precluded the possibility of removing him and taking over control of the company.
"It was a smart system, but nobody thought it would be used against Khodorkovsky," Golubovich said.
According to the ex-manager, Khodorkovsky forced all Menatep shareholders to place their shares in trust management. He said resistance would not have helped him to get his shares anyway, but would set Khodorkovsky against him.
Problems "started in early 2001 and concerned my family," Golubovich said. "A bomb exploded near our house when a car carrying my wife was driving past. It was apparently a warning, as the bomb exploded when the car had gone past."
He said "Menatep and Yukos were the only reasons" he could think of, and he started the resignation procedure.
Golubovich also said attempts had been made on the lives of some company managers: "First they got rid of those who proved useless to them, and I mean useless to somebody other than Khodorkovsky, who could not personally control everything, notably the security department. He knew that the department was a state within a state, with its own interests and objectives unrelated to the security of Yukos."
The ex-manager said his wife and some other ex-members of the company had been poisoned with quicksilver.
"The poisoned had held top posts in Yukos and had problems with Nevzlin and his security department. In fact, they had no reasons to love the former management for a host of reasons," Golubovich said.
The Yukos ex-director is under house arrest in Italy. He was detained on an international Interpol warrant issued at the request of Russia's Office of Prosecutor General in May when he was preparing to leave for Britain, where he has lived since 2003.
Golubovich is charged with grand fraud and refusal to comply with court rulings.
According to investigators, the damage done to the state by the actions of Golubovich as part of a criminal group is valued at more than $283 million. In late 2004, an arrest warrant was issued for him and he was put on the federal wanted list.
Golubovich told RIA Novosti's office in Rome in an e-mail interview that he had done nothing illegal and hoped to return to Russia.
