"I support resolution of this case in a due judicial procedure," Kudrin told journalists Saturday, commenting on statements made by some of the YUKOS officials that they would like to establish a dialogue with the authorities and, for that reason, had forwarded letters to a number of governmental agencies, including the Finance Ministry.
"Our Russian billionaires came to existence at the moment when Russia ceased to be a socialist state, when the country was introducing the free market economy, when it launched the privatization process," Alexei Kudrin said earlier today in an interview broadcast live by the Mayak radio station. He was answering a question asked by a listener who wondered how billionaires could have emerged in a country so heavily hit by poverty.
At the initial stage of Russian reforms, Western capital was apprehensive of entering the Russian market, therefore domestic businessmen had an opportunity to buy local enterprises at very low prices, Kudrin pointed out. "Enterprises were purchased through tenders yet at low prices," he added. Today, these enterprises have grown into high-performance entities yielding stable profit, the Minister said.
As far as oil companies are concerned, their capitalization has surged due to high profitability and mounting world oil prices, Kudrin pointed out.
"In March, the world oil prices reached their record highs over the past 20 years; nobody expected that," he reminded the audience. As a result, he said, in 2003 alone Russian oil companies boosted their capitalization by 70 percent on the average. "No other oil companies in the world have been growing that fast; nobody believed that such growth rates were feasible," the Russian Finance Minster said.
At the same time, Kudrin underlined that he was not referring to cases when huge capitals had been amassed through fraud and misappropriation. "I do not mean those cases when immense capitals were amassed through sheer theft. People guilty of such practices must be punished, and the state will start doing it despite the fact that these improprieties had taken place quite some time (three or five years) ago," the Minister said.
Former YUKOS CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russia's wealthiest man, is currently in prison awaiting trial. The Russian Prosecutor General's Office has charged him and some other major YUKOS shareholders with organizing a criminal group which privatized a number of enterprises through fraudulent schemes during massive privatization of the Russian economy in the 1990s. In addition, they are charged with tax evasion and fraud on a large scale.
A few days ago, YUKOS senior officials announced that they could not rule out a possibility that the company would go bankrupt before the end of 2004.
