“World oil prices remained high, and Yukos became the largest company in Russia, as measured by market capitalization. Khodorkovsky and his core partners reaped billions of dollars in dividends. In 2002, for the first time, Khodorkovsky disclosed the ownership structure of Yukos. With this decision, he became the first owner of a major company to break with the climate of secrecy in which Russian capitalism was born in the 1990s, and this pioneering step forward was even more surprising because ...of Khodorkovsky’s own history of murky deals. The disclosure revealed that the oil company was controlled by Group Menatep, a Gibraltar company owned by Khodorkovsky and a handful of close friends. Khodorkovsky’s share of Yukos was worth about $8 billion. Leonid Nevzlin, the computer programmer who had been an early recruit to Khodorkovsky’s youth science center, was also a billionaire shareholder. So was Vasily Shakhnovsky, the onetime engineer who thought up the idea for the Club on Sparrow Hills and later become a Yukos executive.MoreLessRead More Read Less
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