The YukosOil-Putin-Voloshin Crisis

Kremlin Official Leaving May Spark Change

Guardian -Saturday November 1, 2003 6:16 PM

By VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV

MOSCOW (AP) - With the resignation of his veteran chief of staff, President Vladimir Putin bade farewell to the old Kremlin elite that engineered his meteoric rise to power and played a pivotal role in setting his policy during the last four years.

Alexander Voloshin's departure, which closely followed the jailing of Russia's richest tycoon, stirred broad fears that Putin's fellow ex-KGB officers are crowding out Kremlin liberals and laying the groundwork for a redistribution of property that was privatized after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.

Voloshin was seen as the main advocate for Russia's business barons. He had staunchly opposed an official probe against Russia's largest oil company, Yukos, which culminated Oct. 25 in the jailing of its billionaire head, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and the subsequent freeze of Yukos assets.

Voloshin - who reportedly advised Khodorkovsky not to flee abroad - resigned right after the tycoon's arrest. Putin's decision to release him of his duties was announced only Thursday.

The architect of Russia's privatization program, Anatoly Chubais, said Voloshin's dismissal was a ``bad and extremely serious'' signal of a possible government departure from fundamental democratic values and economic freedoms.

Russian media widely reported an unwritten pact between Putin and Russian tycoons, reached shortly after the March 2000 presidential election, in which the president promised not to revisit privatization on condition the business moguls stayed out of politics.

Khodorkovsky's funding of opposition parties in parliament was widely believed to be an important reason behind the probe against Yukos and his jailing on charges of fraud, tax evasion and forgery. Some of the charges concerned privatization deals of the early 1990s, spooking investors who feared that other big companies might be next in the line of fire.

Boris Nemtsov, the leader of the Union of Right Forces, one of two liberal parties Khodorkovsky funded, said on NTV television that Voloshin's departure signaled a possible ``rejection of economic progress, curtailing of democratic freedoms and tightening police controls over the society.''

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printed from The YukosOil-Putin-Voloshin Crisis on 2004-02-23 11:44:11