Kremlin dark horse is Russia's new oil tsar

MOSCOW - Foreign investors beware: Mysterious Kremlin man Igor Sechin is now at the helm of the world's second largest crude producer after the company he chairs gobbled up prized Yukos asset Yugansk.

Sechin is a leading member of the siloviki clan of officials with secret security backgrounds who believe in the supremacy of the state.

"These are not the sort of guys you want to go out drinking with. They're relatively humourless and their patriotism may rub you up the wrong way," said Eric Kraus, chief strategist at Sovlink Securities in Moscow.

Nor does Sechin, whose early career was as a translator, have any known business experience.

"This guy is an administrator, he's there to keep control of the money," said Kraus. "Sechin is kind of faceless, the market will have to find out a lot more about him."

The shock takeover of the legally-disputed Yugansk assets by state oil firm Rosneft has cast an unwelcome spotlight on its chairman Sechin, 44, believed to be the most influential member of President Vladimir Putin's inner circle.

"Sechin is our number two," Alexander Shokhin, a former Russian chief debt negotiator who now is a leading member of the Russian industrialists' association, told Reuters.

"Sechin is one of the most powerful men not only in the political life of Russia but also in our economic life."

Analysts and observers believe that Sechin masterminded the crackdown on Yukos and played a key hand in the state's takeover of the energy sector.

Insiders say Sechin resented the defiance of authority of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the founder of Yukos who is now in jail.

Khodorkovsky was a member of the Soviet Komsomol communist youth union and is considered an extrovert and intelligent by people who know him.

In a bizarre twist, Sechin's daughter recently married the son of Vladimir Ustinov, the chief prosecutor-general in charge of the Yukos case.

Sechin's appointment in July as chairman of Rosneft, which is due to merge with gas giant Gazprom, had already given the markets an indication of how the Kremlin intended to consolidate its control over Russia's riches.

When Rosneft merges with Gazprom, the new entity, together with Yugansk's now renationalised assets, is expected to become the vehicle driving Kremlin energy policy with a share of more than one fifth of Russia's oil output.

Little is known about Sechin's career before he teamed up with Putin in the St Petersburg city administration in the early 1990s.

A graduate of Leningrad State University in 1984 with a degree in philology, he keeps such a low profile that even the Russian press calls him a "phantom".

Many observers and analysts believe Sechin is a graduate of the KGB, the former Soviet Union's infamous secret security service, to which Putin belonged.

Shokhin said Sechin had worked in Angola and Mozambique and specialised in Portuguese-speaking countries in his former job, although his official biography makes no reference to these assignments.

Russian media reports say Sechin in the mid-1980s worked as a translator in Mozambique for the Soviet state company Tekhnoexport, which was responsible for arms supplies, before serving as a military translator in Angola.

Analysts say Sechin is not a man who flies solo and everything he does reflects Putin's will.

- REUTERS