The Extradition of Mikhail Gutseriyev

Forget about Boris Berezovsky or Akhmed Zakayev – the latest Russian national targeted for extradition from the United Kingdom by the Kremlin is Mikhail Gutseriyev, the former CEO of the oil company Russneft. We’ve done a lot of blogging about the attempted nationalization of Russneft, which has all the appearances of being a sequel to Yukos – indeed there is no article about Gutseriyev that doesn’t also mention Mikhail Khodorkovsky – but of course this story hasn’t yet ended in a Siberian gulag. One would think that on a day in which the Russian markets hit a historic low, with trading suspended indefinitely, that the Kremlin wouldn’t want to produce such scary anti-business news … but I suppose that would involve the presumption of rationality in this den of thieves.