Never felt more like singing the Blues

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 423.

Chukotka aside, he has been divesting himself of his Russian interests, including big stakes in Aeroflot and Rusal, an aluminium firm. Sudden changes in "the rules" are possible in the run-up to the presidential election due in 2008: social unrest or an economic downturn may push Mr Putin into populist, anti-oligarch measures. As Mr Berezovsky and Mr Khodorkovsky discovered, presidential successions (if there is a succession) can be risky. And however munificent his gifts, Mr Abramovich is outside the dominant Kremlin cliques of St Petersburgers and former KGB officers. He is a remnant from the Yeltsin era (when his nickname was "the purse"), and thus potentially vulnerable. His defenders say that he is not getting out of Russia but out of business, to spend more time with his football team.

A final ingratiating act may be to sell the 72% stake in Sibneft that he and his associates control. As the role of foreign firms in Russia's energy sector is now strictly limited, there is only one likely buyer: Gazprom, a state-controlled gas giant. (Rosneft, a state-owned oil firm, looks too debt-ridden after buying part of Yukos.) Last month Mr Putin said he knew of the Gazprom-Sibneft negotiations; his remarks were taken as definitive. In Russia's energy sector everything not forbidden now seems compulsory, as one old Soviet joke ran. The biggest obstacle may be public relations: how to finesse the handover of about $10 billion for an asset that Mr Abramovich, with Mr Berezovsky, got for peanuts a decade ago. But if the deal happens, the extravagant yet shy Mr Abramovich will bow out of Russia in a fittingly contradictory way: by helping the government to regain control of the country's energy resources, whose dubious privatisation made him and the other oligarchs billionaires.

1. tax fiddle – налоговое мошенничество

2. to dilute – понизить стоимость акций путем увеличения их числа

3. underhand share issues – тайный выпуск акций

4. debt-ridden – обремененный, отягощенный долгами

5. to get for peanuts – получить за гроши