In October 2003 respectable opinion in the West looked on aghast as Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky—who, in the 1990s, had installed himself as the billionaire owner of private oil giant Yukos in a particularly egregious privatization deal—was arrested and imprisoned on charges of tax evasion.26 A year later, Yukos’s main assets were snapped up in a fire sale by a shell company that turned out to be a front for state-owned Rosneft.
