25 October 2003 18:23
Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russia`s $11 bln oligarch
Mikhail Khodorkovsky, CEO of Russia's largest oil firm YUKOS and the country's richest man, is a tech-happy workaholic who has been tipped as a future president of Russia.
Police bundled the tycoon, worth at least $11 billion, off his plane in Siberia on Saturday and flew him to Moscow where prosecutors charged him with fraud and tax evasion. The charges were brought against him as an individual and as head of YUKOS, which is in talks to sell a big stake to ExxonMobil, the world's largest oil firm. The move was a culmination of a months-long legal attack on YUKOS core shareholders, believed to be fuelled by Kremlin conservatives eager to curb Khodorkovsky's growing influence.
But the 40-year-old businessman, who sees the campaign as an attempt to freeze him out of Russia, has said he would rather become "a political prisoner" than "a political emigre".
Khodorkovsky is happy to spend hours at a time with journalists, but routinely deflects questions about his private life, saying he only wants to discuss serious issues "and anyhow I don't have much spare time".
The communist youth leader-turned-banker came to prominence in the murky early days of Russian privatisation that followed the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, when he persuaded the state to sell him some of Siberia's best oilfields for a song. To learn his trade from the bottom up, Khodorkovsky spent months working as a drill operator on remote Siberian plains.
Quick to realise that his business would only take off if Western standards were applied, he hired foreign managers and started treating minority shareholders with respect, paying them far more in dividends than he had paid for the whole company.
By April 2003, Khodorkovsky acquired smaller rival Sibneft in a complex transaction worth $12-$15 billion to form Russia's first oil "supermajor". The enlarged new firm, due to be formed before 2004, will have the world's biggest oil reserves and produce a third of Russia's crude.
But the greying Khodorkovsky, born in Moscow into a family of engineers, gives the impression of having little fun with his fabulous riches. "I don't like the seaside very much," he once said when asked why he didn't have a villa in Nice, seen as an indispensable accessory by other Russian "oligarchs", as the country's wealthy business elite are known. Instead he says he prefers investing in technology and brains. His immaculate office is filled with hi-tech gadgets, but the man himself often turns up at work in a T-shirt and seems to have an aversion to ties.
Khodorkovsky, married with four children, is a public supporter of Russia's liberal opposition.
He is still seen as a possible candidate for the presidency himself, possibly in 2008 when there is expected to be a vacancy if current incumbent Vladimir Putin sees out a second term. "Many believe that Khodorkovsky wants to be the president in 2008," MDM financial group said in a research note. "Powerful groups may be trying to prevent Khodorkovsky from strengthening."
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