CORPORATE RAIDERS: Oil giant Yukos, run by Khodorkovsky, pictured, was subject to a 16-hour armed search and now faces a tax audit
Vladimir Putin tries hard to convince the world that Russian business has changed since the wild '90s, when it was synonymous with dodgy privatization and contract killings. These days he wants to depict the Russian corporate world as dynamic, modern and predictable. That image shattered last week when the Kremlin went head to head with Russia's richest man, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the 40-year-old proprietor of the oil giant Yukos and the richest man in Russia. The markets dropped abruptly, and polite discourse was infused with language reminiscent of The Godfather. The operation against Khodorkovsky, pundits and Yukos supporters claimed, was a...
