In late July, Gutseriev posted a letter on Russneft’s Web site claiming that the Kremlin was using regulatory pressure as a pretext for expropriating oil and gas companies like his. “They made me an offer to leave the oil business, to leave ‘on good terms,’” wrote Gutseriev. “I refused.” He went on, “To make me more amenable, they tightened the screws on the company with unprecedented persecution.”

It didn’t take long for Deripaska, a Putin crony who ranks 62nd on Forbes magazine’s list of the world’s richest people, to sweep in. He quickly applied for regulatory approval to acquire Russneft and issued a statement that his holding company, Basic Element, would fold Russneft into one of Basic Element’s subsidiaries, En+, which also owns Russian Aluminum, the country’s largest aluminum producer.

In his letter, Gutseriev said he decided to sell out instead of taking the risk that his company would be dismantled like Yukos was.

Gutseriev has an unusual history within the Russian oil business. In 2000, he left his post in the state Duma (parliament) and became chairman of the oil company Slavneft. Two and a half years later he was forced out under pressure from his former government colleagues. Applying the experience and knowledge he gained at Slavneft, he started his own company, Russneft.

Partly sponsored by the Swiss trader Glencore, Gutseriev bought about 30 fields with total reserves of 600 million tons (about 4.4 billion barrels), at fair market prices in auctions against real competitors. It was not what Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Roman Abramovich, or Vagit Alekperov had done in the 1990s during the “loans for shares” auctions, when only a handful of Russians had cash to loan to the government for oil assets. Gutseriev cannot be associated with buying the country’s riches on the cheap, something that the average Russian attributes with disdain to the oligarchs. Gutseriev risked expanding his organization despite the vivid example of the Yukos case, which had already demonstrated the fragility of private business in Russia.

So, why go after a legitimately successful business, one that worked by the government’s own rules? According to sources in Russneft, the reason is that Gutseriev took over some properties that had been earmarked for Rosneft. His first mistake was in buying them, and his second was in refusing to give them away.

The persecution that Gutseriev mentioned in his letter is very real. Over the past several months, he has been hit with charges of tax evasion and illegal undertaking, and his company was pressed for non-compliance with its license commitments, which meant license revocations on his major assets. These were, of course, the same methods used to dismantle Yukos.