Houston Chronicle
Houstonian battles the Kremlin
By LOREN STEFFY Copyright 2009 Houston Chronicle
Aug. 22, 2009, 1:52AM
>From a cluttered desk at his suburban home in north Houston, Bruce
Misamore wages a global battle to recover assets of a long-dead oil
company.
He’s involved in court actions across Europe as well as in Texas and
Russia, where he can’t go for fear of being arrested. He still hands
out business cards with the yellow-and-green logo of Yukos, once
Russia’s second-largest oil company, where he was chief financial
officer.
Five years ago, Russian authorities seized Yukos’ assets to satisfy a
tax judgment against its chairman, the jailed oligarch Mikhail
Khodorkovsky.
Misamore maintains that the tax charges were trumped up and that the
seizure was unjust, a move by the Kremlin to re-nationalize its oil
industry and punish political enemies of Russian leader Vladimir
Putin. Yukos’ assets were eventually sold to two state-owned
companies, Rosneft and Gazprom.
`This whole case is about the forced expropriation of the company
through false taxation,’ Misamore said.
Now retired, Misamore, 59, spends several hours a day working on
Yukos-related legal issues.
All across Europe
The cases have piled up in courts across Europe ‘ Armenia, Cyprus,
Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, the Netherlands, Switzerland ‘ weaving a
tale that’s part John Grisham, part John le Carré.
In 2006, he and other former executives sold Yukos’ Lithuanian
refinery and its pipeline in Slovakia, collecting about $1
billion. The proceeds are held by two Dutch companies set up by
Misamore and other former Yukos executives outside Russia on behalf of
the company’s shareholders.
`We’ve been able to protect that from the Russian government so far,’
he said.
Russian prosecutors have argued that Misamore and his counterparts
stripped valuable assets from the company and sold them for personal
gain.
Calls allegations absurd
Misamore dismisses the allegations as absurd. He and the other former
executives are pressing their own claims that could exceed
$100??billion against the Russian government before the European
Court of Human Rights. It’s the largest case of its kind to be brought
in the court’s 60-year history. A hearing is set for November in
Strasbourg, France.
Any proceeds would be distributed to the com- pany’s 60,000
shareholders, many of them Russian nationals and oil field workers in
Siberia. (Misamore said he sold most of his own Yukos stock at a loss
years ago.)
If the ECHR case succeeds, it would be a blow to the Kremlin, and in
addition to winning long-sought compensation for Yukos shareholders
could help Khodorkovsky, who’s serving a nine-year sentence in Siberia
and is facing new charges that could extend his prison term.
This wasn’t how Misamore expected to spend retirement. A veteran of
Marathon and Pennzoil, he joined Yukos in 2000. The company wanted to
establish Western accounting standards and planned an international
expansion that included acquiring oil interests in the U.S.
About a year after Khodorkovsky’s arrest in 2003, Misamore was in
London when he received a call from another company official that the
Russian government was seizing company assets and warning him not to
return to Moscow or he might be arrested.
He returned to Houston and, with a company-owned laptop as the only
listed asset, put Yukos in Chapter 11 to stall the seizure.
Stolen laptop
The tactic, though, didn’t work for long, and the laptop was later
stolen in a mysterious home burglary that Misamore believes was the
work of the former KGB.
Since then, he’s been focusing on Yukos’ assets outside Russia to
which, he argued, shareholders have a legitimate claim. Several
European courts have agreed, although the Russian government continues
to battle him on every front.
He fights on from his office in the Champions area, which is adorned
with trin-kets bearing the Yukos name. On the wall hangs a Soviet-era
poster that proclaims `Oil, the blood of the state.’
For Misamore, five years after the saga began, it seems more like the
blood from a turnip.
Loren Steffy is the Chronicle’s business columnist. His commentary
appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Contact him at
[email protected]. His blog is at