Last month a court in the Hague ruled that Russia needs to compensate the ex owners of Yukos to the tune of $50 billion. Yukos is a Russian oil giant that we could say has been seized twice in the last 30 years through scrupulous means. This was all politically motivated having been sold for roughly 6% of it's valuation first time around and then obtained for free on the second occasion.
I am sure you have heard the term oligarch and know know how the original 7 oligarchs became so wealthy. Back in 1992 when Boris Yeltsin was in power it was decided to privatize the State Owned Enterprises with the hope they would become profitable and not a burden on the state. Back in 1992 there were a reported 215 000 SOE's and after 9 months had only managed to prvatise a little over 12 000. The process needed speeding up and that is when they started handing out vouchers to Russian citizens. Each voucher represented a share which at the time the Government said were worth around $40 each.
This was a time of opportunity and what some groups did was buy these vouchers from the people by offering them very little for these vouchers. Mikhail Khodorkovsky reportedly offered no more than 3 Rubles per voucher which allowed him to buy up millions of vouchers costing very little. This is how the oligarchs managed to amass their fortunes because the Russian people did not see the value in a voucher when they were all starving an unemployed.
The other larger more valuable SOE's became available to those that had bought those vouchers in a closed auction which was dominated by the what would become the 7 oligarchs. Mikhail Khodorkovsky was one of those 7 and he managed to acquire Yukos Oil for around $300 million when the true valuation was around $5 billion. Another oligarch acquired Sibneft oil for $100 million whilst valued at $3 billion. These were financed from international loans and where there fortune was generated immediately. This is in the same type of way Roman Abramovich became so wealthy.
When Putin came to power he was no fan of the oligarchs because he saw them as having stolen from the State. His intention was to get these now privatized companies back under State control by removing the oligarchs. He started off by taking back the television stations and then charged the owners of Yukos for tax evasion. The tax evasion was a ploy to bankrupt the company because the tax figure kept rising. Khodorkovsky tried to settle the tax bill, but this number kept on rising.
Eventually Khodorkovsky was arrested and spent 10 years in a Siberian prison with the end result that Yukos was forced into bankruptcy and taken over by Russia's state owned Rosneft oil. Today Khodorkovsky does not have his $15 billion fortune that saw him feature as 16th richest man in the world on the Forbes rich list. He has only a modest $500 million fortune today living in exile in London.
At the time of his imprisonment he owned 78% of Yukos which according to the Hague court is now owed $39 billion by the Russian Government. He has no chance of receiving any of this even though there are more and more Russian assets being seized around the world putting more pressure on the Kremlin.