Russian President Vladimir Putin did not have to send out the tanks when last winter neighboring Georgia's objections to Moscow's military bases on its territory got too annoying.
He simply shut the gas taps.
The episode became another example of how Gazprom -- the world's largest gas producer and provider of 8 percent of Russia's gross domestic product -- has evolved into a vital tool on the Kremlin's domestic and foreign policy arsenal.
Gazprom's reach at home is all pervading.
The firm controls 30 newspapers, television and radio stations, subsidizes hundreds of Siberian Arctic towns, owns schools, hotels, yacht clubs, aircraft and airports, while its 35-storey blue-glass headquarters towers over Moscow.
Then there are the gas assets: 150,000km of pipelines and 300,000 workers spanning 12 time zones.
By 2020, its reserves of 30 trillion cubic metres will supply two-thirds of European needs and China's booming market.
"Gazprom cannot help but be a political instrument. When it makes a decision, you must view it against the prism of Russian foreign policy," said Stephen O'Sullivan, analyst at United Financial Group, which administers on behalf of clients some minority stakes in Gazprom.
In Russia, one hand washes the other. Analysts say the Kremlin-Gazprom partnership makes good political as well as business sense. If Putin uses Gazprom as a lever in foreign negotiations, he also pushes gas sales east, west and south.
Most recently, analysts say, it was Kremlin intervention that put Gazprom on the short list of international firms competing to build a US$20 billion trans-China gas pipeline. So when Putin was scouting for someone to help consolidate his hold on the 38 percent state-owned firm, he chose Alexei Miller -- a close ally from his own home town St Petersburg.
In an assault on Gazprom, which reflected Putin's concern for the strategically crucial firm, CEO Rem Vyakhirev, who for nearly a decade ran the firm as his personal fiefdom was sacked. Soon after, other Vyakhirev allies were shown the door.
Gazprom is the new avatar of the Soviet Ministry of Gas -- in 1989 transformed into a company and then privatized. Analysts say that during Russia's often-criticized privatizations of the early 1990s, swathes of Gazprom shares were snapped up by top managers and former Soviet officials.
"Somehow less than 40 percent has ended up in state hands.
"Auctions were manipulated so that favored people got many shares at low prices," UFG's O'Sullivan said.
So tight a ship did Vyakhirev run, that the state, Gazprom's largest shareholder, had little idea of what the firm was up to.
When Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov was asked in a 1997 interview about the company, he said simply: "To be very frank, no one knows anything about Gazprom."
That is now likely to change, analysts say, because Putin realizes that Gazprom is likely to be far more effective than tanks in keeping ex-Soviet states firmly in Russia's backyard.
"Putin's clear view is to build very close relationships with all the ex-Soviet states and gas is an absolutely crucial element in that," said Jonathan Stern, Associate Fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs.
Some 35 percent of the EU's gas comes from Russia and that will rise to 60 percent in the enlarged EU -- putting Europe's security of supply firmly in Russian hands.
The new board, packed with Putin's coterie, will be more a Kremlin tool then earlier, anlaysts say.
"Now we shall see a closer relationship between the Kremlin and Gazprom under Miller," O'Sullivan says. "In fact Miller and the Kremlin -- they are one and the same."
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