Wall Street Journal exposes Lukoil insiders

“On the last day of August in 1997, a Russian oil tycoon named Vitaly Schmidt sat down to lunch at his Moscow apartment with his woman friend and his sister. The 48-year-old engineer downed a large helping of boiled-meat dumplings and a couple of shots of vodka. Three hours later, he was dead.
Mr. Schmidt was a multimillionaire with luxury residences in four countries. Much of his fortune came from a group of small offshore energy companies he oversaw on behalf of himself and a few fellow executives of a big Russian oil company, OAO Lukoil.”

• This compelling 3,000-word story, titled “At Lukoil, an Executive’s Death Exposes Network of Inside Deals,” by Glenn R. Simpson, was published by The Wall Sreet Journal on December 6th, 2006.
  
• Thanks to permission from The WSJ, you can read the article here in English and here in Russian.