Government Gets Apatit Stake Back 17 February 2009 Moscow Times
The government regained a stake in Apatit, the phosphate miner formerly controlled by jailed businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky, after a court overturned the company's 1990s privatization, PhosAgro Group, Apatit's parent company, said in a regulatory filing. The Federal Property Management Agency took control last week of 27 percent of Apatit following a December ruling by a Moscow court that PhosAgro may appeal, CEO Maxim Volkov said, Vedomosti reported Monday. Acron and Norway's Yara International share a 10 percent stake in Apatit, which is based in the Murmansk region. During a visit to the company's Veliky Novgorod plant last month, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin praised Acron owner Vyacheslav Kantor for not cutting jobs during the economic turmoil. Putin was president when Khodorkovsky was arrested and convicted of fraud and tax evasion and sentenced in 2005 to eight years in prison. The case against Khodorkovsky and his Menatep Group began with an investigation into how Apatit was acquired in the 1990s.
When I worked in Murmansk oblast in the early 1990s, it was in the town of Kirovsk, where the miners lived. The repairs of the hotel Severnaya, on which I was working, were paid for by the sale of the apatite to a Hungarian trade organisation which employed me. "Sale" isn't quite the right word, since it was more like a barter deal involving apatite on one side and building contracts, TVs and foreign trips on the other.
At the time I didn't know anything about the privatisation, but just wondered why the work on the hotel came to an abrupt end. Now I know.
