I had this secret. I robbed banks in my spare time.

Lives Less Ordinary from the BBC World Service.

This is not a good thing to do because police are after you.

Find out more at the end of this podcast.

Hello, I'm Leslie Kerwin. Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. One of the world's most controversial energy companies, Gazprom, is engulfed in the politics of war. How did it get here?

It didn't have to, in my mind, become a totally normal company. All it had to do was,

you know, go on a transition from horrible to bad. I reported from Siberia two decades ago

on Gazprom's empire, when there was still hope it could be a trusted global player.

Gasprom wanted always to be viewed as a reliable gas supplier.

And so here we are facing this weaponization of gas, which is changing the narrative forever of

Gazprom.

That's all in Business Daily from the BBC. We're pumping gas sings the choir on the Chumen Transgas company anthem.

We're pumping gas to keep the whole of Russia warm.

The singing of Russian gas workers from Tumen Transgas, a powerful subsidiary of gas prom.

I first heard that music in 2002, when I arrived in Siberia in a Gazprom company plane to see the inner workings of this strange, privatised

monster of a company, an empire of its own with 300,000 workers and the largest gas reserves on the planet. Back then,

it was eager to be taken seriously abroad and to sell more of its gas into Europe, which it did.

This year, war in Ukraine changed everything when Gazprom's political master Vladimir Putin

turned off the gas taps to Poland, Bulgaria and Finland.

I want to know how did we get here?

What has been Gazprom's reputation and what will its future look like?

Let's go back to 2002. It was minus 20 centigrade, and I was shivering just outside the Siberian city of Yugosk. We've got four gas pipelines here, so theoretically we can pump 400 million cubic meters of gas through here every day.

...