Oil's well that ends well

摘要

In one of the jokes Russians tell about Roman Abramovich, owner of Chelsea football club and until this week an oil tycoon, he complains that London is an expensive city. Punch-line: "He still can't buy it." Mr Abramovich's adopted home city may be unaffordable. But he should now at least be able to splash out on a few more yachts and soccer players. On September 28th, he and his associates agreed to sell their 72.7% stake in Sibneft, Russia's fifth-biggest oil firm, to Gazprom, a state-controlled gas giant, for $13.1 billion. The deal itself—Russia's biggest ever takeover-was hardly a surprise: half the lawyers in Moscow seem to have been working on it, and on the whopping loans from a consortium of western banks said to be financing it, for months. The process acquired an extra sense of inevitability when Vladimir Putin, Russia's president, said he was aware of it. Still, it raises two big questions-and one big mystery.