A UK-based consortium of investors has offered an olive branch to the Kremlin over the slow dismemberment of Russia's largest oil company, Yukos, offering to pay off the company's tax debts in exchange for the controlling share now held by jailed oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
Only former Yukos shareholder Konstantin Kagalovsky, who now lives in Britain and is spearheading the effort, has been named publicly. Kagalovsky, an aide to former Russian president Boris Yeltsin, oversaw privatization of Yukos in the mid-1990s and was a senior executive in the company from 2000 to 2002.
The group's spokesman, Charles Stewart-Smith, said other members had chosen to remain anonymous and he would not even confirm all are based in Britain, although he referred to them as "financial investors" rather than as players in the oil market.
A letter was sent directly to Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday morning, Stewart-Smith said. The offer entails paying off the tax debts in return for the unfreezing of Yukos assets and their subsequent purchase.
Yukos, which is facing the seizure and sale of its core operating group to pay off a US$3.4 billion tax bill dating from 2000 as well as a US$3.3 billion bill from 2001 and others from subsequent years, has warned it will be bankrupt by the middle of next month if its accounts are not unfrozen and the seizure goes ahead.
Yukos' main shareholder, Khodorkovsky, and another investor, Platon Lebedev, are on trial in Moscow on charges of tax evasion and fraud dating back to company activities in the early 1990s. But the case against a company, which had become among the most transparent in Russia in recent years is widely seen as politically motivated.
Analysts warned on Friday that they had little hope of the Kremlin's accepting the offer.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained