Word: auction
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...last wednesday of September, Russia's second largest oil company, Lukoil, hoisted the Stars and Stripes up a flagpole outside its Moscow headquarters to celebrate a landmark deal: with a $2 billion bid, the U.S. firm ConocoPhillips had just won an auction for the Russian government's 7.6% stake in the firm. The two companies promptly announced a strategic alliance to develop oil reserves in the Russian Arctic and potentially work together in Iraq. For Jim Mulva, Conoco's president and chief executive, the deal amounted to a coup, giving Conoco access to 8 billion bbl. of proven oil reserves...
...billionaire who built Yukos into an energy powerhouse, was arrested and put on trial for alleged fraud and tax evasion, charges he says were trumped up. Since then, Yukos has been hit with a $24 billion bill for back taxes, and the government announced in November that it will auction off the company's most valuable subsidiary, Yugansk Oil & Gas, on Dec. 19 to pay the tax bill - a move Yukos ceo Steven Theede lambasted as "government-organized theft to settle a political score." The Kremlin set the starting price for the auction at $8.65 billion, roughly half...
...Many in Moscow expect the Yugansk auction to be just the beginning of a final carve-up of the company. Yukos is trying to stop the forced sale, which violates Russian statutes stipulating that non-core assets be sold first in the event of tax claims. The firm has launched legal proceedings against the Kremlin under an international energy charter and says it will sue the winner of the Dec. 19 bidding. "This has nothing to do with taxes and everything to do with expropriation," argues Robert Amsterdam, a Toronto-based lawyer for Khodorkovsky...
...suppliers and staff as well. In early November, authorities issued an arrest warrant for the company's chief lawyer, Dmitry Gololobov. Last week, the firm's chief financial officer, Bruce Misamore, fled the country along with other top management, citing fear for their personal security. And the Yugansk auction is scheduled the day before a shareholder vote called to decide whether to file for bankruptcy protection; a principal reason Yukos hasn't already done so is that a majority of the board believes it would be impossible to find a Russian court willing to approve the petition. Indeed...
...eBay, with the clock ticking down on an item we really don't need and may not even want, and our sportsman's juices surge: It's the two-minute warning at Super Bowl XXXVI. (New England Patriots 20, St. Louis Rams 17.) For guys at an online auction, it's not just the getting that counts, it's the crushing of another bidder's acquisitive spirit. In the final seconds of an auction, we - all right, I - enter a last, astronomical bid. I won, won, won! Then the inevitable deflation sets in: But what did I win? And what...