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vortexmagus
So you attribute the ruble problems to economic sanctions and longstanding debt from the Russian oil companies? hmmm
AND policy of RUB rate freefloat that was finally implemented by the central bank of Russia like a week before that.
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I'm not too well-read on the Yukos sizure
Exactly :)
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as far as I can tell, oil in Russia was taxed long before 2004, and Yukos was a private company bought off the 1990 rigged privatization auctions for the wealthy and well-connected. That company ended up running 20% of Russia's total oil output in 2000.
Aside from Yukos' oil market estimate - all wrong. It was as I've written before. You should also note that major tax income comes not from oil extraction, but from oil exports, and on papers Yukos did not export oil, they have exported "wellsite liquid", which was effectively oil, but not taxed as such. Also, the main current oil tax, "Tax for resource extraction", was implemented in 2002 and was not paid by oil companies in the full for the first couple of years.
To make things further, around 2003, Russia has nuked production sharing agreements on oil and gas with international oil companies, namely ExxonMobil, Shell, Mitsubishi, Mitsui, Total etc., getting major part of those profits to state-owned companies as well.
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It's not that they started paying "taxes" on Yukos - Yukos always paid taxes (the same amount as the other oil corporations,
Exactly. Because noone has paid any taxes. Starting 2003 - things changed.
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Putin seized all of Yukos' assets to make up for budget shortfalls
Wrong reasons. The assets were effecively seized to seize assets, not to "make up for budget shortfalls". Noone cares about "budget shortfalls" when major oil resources are at stake.
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so instead of it paying a percentage of its earnings in corporate taxes, 100% of its earnings went to Russia instead and multiplied the national budget by a huge amount.
Wrong. State-owned public companies are still public companies. Rosneft's direct owner is Rosneftegaz, which is in turn owned by Russia. No more than 50% of profits is paid as dividents, so budget can never get more than 25% of yearly Rosneft's profits, and Rosneftegaz rarely pays dividents to budget - it uses its money to further consolidate energy assets.
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Furthermore, the seizure of Yukos terrified the other Russian oil magnates, like you said, so they started paying the full statutory tax rate of 30% rather than the tax-haven rate of 11% which previously every oil company used.
You bet, boy. Those fuckers have finally started to pay attention to such thing as state. The tax numbers you give are all wrong though.
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This would naturally link the economy of Russia even further to oil, no?
Russian economy did not change with the act. Assets are the same. The budget on the other hand has got a possibility to draw resources to stimulate other sectors of economy - that was what effectively happened.
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Feel free to correct me anywhere I'm wrong
You're welcome.
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this is after a brief skimming of available information on the Yukos seizure, I don't know too much about Russian oil scandals
That's exactly the reason why you say so much bullshit here. You don't "do research", you "skim available information", which means "open Bloomberg article and believe it". You need to change that, seriously.