Who stayed on the pipeline?
It is well known that Konstantin Chuychenko and Oleg Pal’chikov are directors of RUE. Chuychenko – formerly a member of the KGB – is from St Petersburg and a member of the Gazprom managing board (pravleniye) and the head of the legal department. He knew Ilya Eliseyev at the St Petersburg university (gosuniversitet) – Eliseyev is now the deputy head of the managing board (pravleniye) of Gazprombank. (Another former student at the St Petersburg university was Dmitri Medvedev who is now first vice-prime minister of the Russian government and chairman of the board of directors (sovet directorov) of Gazprom. Medvedev was a former colleague of Vladimir Putin when they were working for the St Petersburg administration.)
Oleg Pal’chikov was the Eural TG ETG representative in Moscow up till three years ago. ETG, registered in Hungary, handled Turkmen gas deliveries to Ukraine before RUE... It was created, in part, by a lawyer representing the “solntsevskaya” group of Semyon Mogilevich, still on the FBI wanted list. Oleg Pal’chikov’s wife worked at Gazprom, Itera Rus’ and Sogaz.
Little is known about the third director of RUE, Lars Haussmann, who comes from the Swiss town of Herliberg near Zurich.
RUE is 50% owned by Gazprombank through AROSGAZ Holding AG (Vienna) which is in turn owned by two companies – Cyprus offshore Siritia Ventures Ltd which is 100% owned by OOO Rubin (Moscow). Rubin is itself owned by Gazprombank. Arosgaz Holding is headed by several Gazprombank managers – Konstantin Shmelev, Aleksey Matveyev, Adrey Kravtsov and the head of the department of corporate finance, Viktor Komarov.
The other 50% of RUE is controlled by Centragas Holding AG (Vienna). The company is located at the same address as Ukrinvest Holding AG and ZANGAS Hoch-und Tiefbau (Zangas). Two board members of Centragas, David Antony Howard Brown and Wilson Howard are directors of Ukrinvest Holding and Austrian Zangas. The director of Centragas Wolfgang Putschek – one of the managers of Raiffaisen Investment AG (Vienna) is also on the managing board of Ukrinvest Holding. Ukrinvestholding is controlled by the offshore company NOSILKA Ventures Ltd.
Zangas is constructing the second string of the pipeline in Turkmensitan for $116.23 million and in return is supposed to be getting 1937.17 million m3 Turkmen gas at a price of $60 on the Uzbek/Turkmen border.
Zangas is wholly controlled by Anzola Construction Limited LLC. There is here a connection with Zarubezhneftegazstroy, a Russian company (OAO) involved in oil and gas construction on CIS territory and abroad, including Africa. After the privatisation of Zarubezhneftegazstroy the Russian government with great effort and through the courts managed to retain a golden share in the company. Having achieved this, it suddenly – in 2000 – unexpectedly sold over 60% of shares [EGM note: it is unclear as to what exactly this 60% refers to – 60% of its own shares or of total shares in Zarubezh, Ed.] at the strange price of $14 million to a wholly unknown company. Over 2001-2002 names began to appear in the Zangas council of directors which wholly coincided with the names of former officials working for the Ministry of fuel and energy of the Russian Federation, such as Kirillov (deputy head of the department of financial-economic regulations at thermo-electric power stations and Negodin, the former head of the department of regional development. The principle owners of Russian Zangas included 5 unknown companies as well as the former director of Zarubezhneftegazstroy, Vladimir Kopyshevskiy and Feliks Kopyshevskiy.
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