Gazprom

Gazprom   (Corporation, Oil company)
Headquarters	Saint Petersburg, Russia
Russian oil and gas giant corporation

Gazprom is a Russian state-owned multinational energy corporation headquartered in Saint Petersburg.

Overview

As of 2019, with sales over $120,000,000,000, it sat as the largest publicly listed natural gas company in the world and the largest company in Russia by revenue. In the 2020 Forbes Global 2000, Gazprom was ranked as the 32nd -largest public company in the world. Gazprom name is a portmanteau of the Russian words Gazovaya Promyshlennost – gas industry). In January 2022, Gazprom displaced Sberbank from the first place in the list of the largest companies in Russia by market capitalization.

Gazprom is vertically integrated and is active in every area of the gas industry, including exploration and production, refining, transport, distribution and marketing, and power generation. In 2018, Gazprom produced twelve percent of the global output of natural gas, producing 497.6 billion cubic meters of natural and associated gas and 15.9 million tonnes of gas condensate. Gazprom then exports the gas through pipelines that the company builds and owns across Russia and abroad such as Nord Stream and TurkStream. In the same year, Gazprom has proven reserves of 35.1 trillion cubic meters of gas and 1.6 billion tons of gas condensate. Gazprom is also a large oil producer through its subsidiary Gazprom Neft, producing about 41 million tons of oil with reserves amounting to 2 billion tons. The company also has subsidiaries in industrial sectors including finance, media and aviation, and majority stakes in other companies.

Gazprom was created in 1989, when the Soviet Ministry of Gas Industry was converted to a corporation, becoming the first state-run corporate enterprise in the Soviet Union. After the Soviet Union's dissolution, Gazprom was privatized, retaining its Russia-based assets. At that time, Gazprom evaded taxes and state regulation and engaged in asset stripping. The company later returned to government control in the early 2000s, and since then, the company is involved in the Russian government's diplomatic efforts, setting of gas prices, and access to pipelines.

The company is mostly owned by the Russian government, via the Federal Agency for State Property Management and Rosneftegaz, while remaining shares are traded publicly.

Dead executives in 2022

In February 2022, 61-year-old Alexander Tyulakov, Deputy General Director of the Unified Settlement Center of Gazprom for Corporate Security, was found dead in the prestigious village of Leninskoye in the Vyborg District of the Leningrad Region. A note was found nearby, law enforcement officials told media.

A month earlier, the 60-year-old head of the transport service of Gazprom Invest, Leonid Shulman, was found dead in a mansion in the same village of Leninskoye. A retractable construction knife was found on the side of the bath. A note was also found. Both of the deceased previously worked at Gazprom Transgaz, a 100% subsidiary of Gazprom.

In March 2022, Ukrainian-born Mikhail Watford (born Mikhail Tolstosheya) was found hanged in the garage of his mansion in Surrey, UK. He too was an oil and gas magnate who made his fortune after the demise of the Soviet Union.

Also in March 2022, Vasily Melnikov died with his wife and two children near Nizhny Novgorod. According to investigators, he first killed his relatives and then himself.

In July 2022, 61-year-old Yuri Vorono was found dead in the pool at his mansion in a St. Petersburg suburb, with a gunshot wound to the head. A handgun was found nearby. Several used casings was lying on the bottom of the pool. The multimillionaire owned a logistics company that had lucrative deals with Gazprom in the Arctic. The Russian investigators attribute Voronov's death to a "quarrel with business partners."

In April 2022, the former deputy head of Gazprom Bank Valdislav Avayev and Sergei Protosenya, the former manager of Novatek, Russia's largest private gas producer, died. Both are said to have killed their wife and children first and then themselves. Avayev's body and those of his wife and daughter were found in the family's Moscow home on April 18. Protosenja is said to have hanged himself in his villa in Spain just two days later, after he is also said to have killed his wife and daughter.

In May 2022, Andrei Krukowski had an accident. He was the manager of the Russian ski resort Krasnaya Polyana, operated by Gazprom. According to investigators, the 37-year-old fell to his death while hiking off a cliff.

After that, Alexander Subbotin died. According to Russian media reports, he died in a bizarre way. After drinking too much alcohol, the oil manager went to a shaman couple for a "hangover treatment", it is said. In her apartment north of Moscow, the shamans cut his skin and dripped toad poison into the wounds, among other things. When the billionaire was not feeling well, the couple put him to rest in the basement of the house and found him dead a little later.

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