Welcome. This is Anastasia Yuglova bringing you the Cato Daily Podcast.

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Attorney to former Uco CEO Mikhail Hadarkovsky, Robert Amsterdam, addressed the Cato

Institute on Monday on the topic of Russian energy policy and the new Russian state.

He described how the treatment of private energy companies in Russia is part of a broader

pattern of political centralization and a more aggressive energy-driven foreign policy.

Robert is our guest in today's podcast.

You spoke a lot about an attack on the rule of law in Russia.

Could you elaborate on that?

Essentially, and beginning even before the attack on Hutterkovsky, the Russian authorities

have mounted a full-blown attack on any form of legal activity that related to what they viewed as strategic resources such as energy.

And there has, in addition to this, been a closure and a tax on newspapers changes to the law on federalism.

There have been really wholesale and dramatic amendments to the Constitution which have not

been passed as such but which have had an effect of consolidating

what Mr Putin calls the vertical of power and this has been done in the context of

the massive expropriation of Yukos and the ongoing theft of other companies within Russia that was just profiled. of

you close and the ongoing theft of other companies within Russia.

It was just profiled actually on the weekend in an article by Peter Finn in the Washington Post.

That and of course the following up of the attacks on Saackel and Co-Victo in terms of BP demonstrates

the use of law really as a cover, the use of environmental law and tax law as a cover

for the confiscatory policies of a junta more than a regime.

...