Gazprom, the largest Russian company, was privatized through the voucher operation?
Klebnikov: Yes. The typical stake in a company that would be privatized through vouchers is anywhere from 29 percent to 35 percent. The government took most of the big companies in Russia, including all the natural resource producers, and privatized 29 percent through vouchers. So about a third of Russia s industrial and natural resource wealth was privatized through vouchers. Gazprom, which is the natural gas monopoly of Russia, owns one-third of the global reserves of natural gas. If you valued it as an American company per cubic meter of reserves, it would be valued anywhere between $300 billion and $900 billion. Of course, it s not an American company and property rights in Russia are weaker and so forth. But even in the Russian context, this is a company that had a stock market value in 1997 of $40 billion. So, when the government decided to privatize 29 percent of Gazprom in the 1994 voucher auctions, what happened? First, they gave the right to design the whole voucher auction t
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