4 hours of Putin

Looking tired and older, Russia’s Prime Minister made sure that he filled a full 4 hours of a question and answer talk show with Russian citizens. To be sure, a normal radio show is typically 3-4 hours long, but this is a PM and not a media regular host.

So question one is whether the marathon show was designed to place himself back in the driver’s seat? Question two, linked to the first, is whether he’s worried about the growing stability seen as a result of Dmitry Medvedev sitting in the Kremlin while Mr Putin offices over in the Russian White House.

At times testy, at times tired, and at times funny, Mr Putin held court and you can bet that many a Russian tuned in.

How many times can you sell Yukos and imprison it’s owner? Apparently never enough. Just when you’d thought that Yukos was over, Mr Putin made it an issue again. This time the Prime Minister accused Mikhail Khodorkovsky of ordering murders while running Yukos.

Of course it was Putin, who as president oversaw Khodorkovsky’s arrest in 2003 and subsequent sentencing to 8 1/2 years in prison on tax and fraud charges.

Yukos was bankrupted after tax authorities demanded billions of dollars in back taxes in a case that is widely seen as punishment from Putin’s Kremlin for Khodorkovsky’s political and commercial ambitions. Khodorkovsky, his business partner Platon Lebedev and Yukos’ security chief have all been jailed.

Putin said Thursday that funds collected in the forced sell-off of Yukos’ assets had been spent by the government on the needs of ordinary people. He said Russia used 240 billion rubles ($8.2 billion) of the proceeds from the bankruptcy auctions to create a housing and communal services fund.

“I have never said it publicly before, but now I will say that the funds earned from the Yukos assets were transferred to the budget,” Putin said. “If money was once stolen from the people, it should be returned directly back to the nation.”

But information about Yukos assets being spent on housing is not new. In 2007, the State Duma passed a bill that allowed the government to pump billions of dollars from the sale of the assets into housing and high-tech research. Frankly, it’s meaningless to promise money from a trial that took place half a decade ago.  

The question that brought up Khodorkovsky’s case was raised when the call-in show’s host read out the question, “When will Khodorkovsky be released?” It was not clear whether the question was called in or read from a pre-prepared script as the question came from the radio host and not a caller. If from the host, then it’s a soft-ball set up question. If from a caller, then maybe it’s an indication that the average Russian is not so blind to what the government did to bring down Yukos.

Also noteworthy is that Mr Putin conveniently failed to mention is that he took a $200 MILLION finders fee while serving as president when ordering Khodorkovsky’s arrest and directing the sale of Yukos assets to a Kremlin controlled competitor. The average Babushka trying to survive on a meager penion has to wonder what happened to her finders fee.

~ by mendeleyev on 05/12/2009.