- What do you think about what happened to YUKOS last week?
- A lot has already been said about the YUKOS Affair, but YUKOS is not the real problem. Freezing its shares not only goes beyond the bounds of legality, but also common sense. The state has shown that now anything is possible.
- The share freeze oversteps the law?
- Not the freeze itself, but the way it was done on Thursday was simply bizarre! It is the same as if you had some kind of property dispute with a person whose mother-in-law has an apartment, and therefore you arrest everyone in her apartment building. If anything is possible, then everything is possible! The president has under a month or at best a week in order to calm the public down. Otherwise, we can just say goodbye to the Russian economic miracle which has already begun—a new economic upswing is underway- and we will probably slink into no-man’s-land.
- Are there any optimistic predictions for how the situation could develop?
- Well, as I already said yes, if the president doesn’t overreact. But if he does, he should say so himself.
- Yet the Western media have reacted much more calmly.
- And they are completely right. It absolutely does not matter who will own the oil company. Thank God, YUKOS keeps pumping oil. I am worried about to what extent Russia will protect private property. Because investors have just began to trust Russian business and invest. Investment is growing, growing as it should across the entire economy, and not just in raw materials. Many businessmen made brilliant investment plans for 2004. Now everything has been turned on its head. That’s what, first and foremost, is worrying people, not Khodorkovsky’s fate.

Read soon the editorial!