The head of giant state oil and gas holding company Naftogaz Ukrainy resigned on March 24, saying political reasons and pressure from the West had forced him to quit.
Ihor Bakai called a special press conference to announce his surprise resignation, saying he had submitted a corresponding request to Prime Minister Viktor Yushchenko earlier the same day.
'I don't want my name to be the subject of political blackmail by the highest state officials,' Bakai said. He said demands that he be removed from office were coming 'from the West,' but did not elaborate.
Yushchenko accepted Bakai's resignation, the Cabinet's press service said on March 27.
Bakai, 36, has headed the giant Naftogaz since it was set up in 1998 to unite all of the country's state-owned oil and gas enterprises. The company, whose charter capital amounts to Hr 10 billion, controls practically all domestic oil and gas extraction, and owns a huge national network of oil and gas pipelines.
In addition, Naftogaz annually receives about 30 billion cubic meters of gas, or nearly half of domestic needs, from Russian gas monopoly Gazprom in fees for pumping Russian gas exported through Ukraine.
Bakai's name figured in Western press reports earlier this year that focused on high-level corruption in Ukraine.
The Financial Times, in particular, wrote that Bakai and several other senior officials were on a list of people that the U.S. government wanted barred from influencing policy-making in Kyiv. President Leonid Kuchma was given the list when he visited Washington in December, the newspaper reported. U.S. authorities reportedly refused to issue Bakai an entry visa the same month.
A source close to Bakai said that Kuchma's administration recently received a new request from the United States to remove Bakai from office, and the president had agreed to meet that demand.
Bakai's relations with the new government of Viktor Yushchenko have also been strained, and since the start of the year their has been a rising tide of speculation among analysts as to his precarious position.
Yulia Tymoshenko, deputy prime minister in charge of the energy sector, has repeatedly criticized Naftogaz for poorly collecting gas bills from consumers and illegally siphoning off Russian gas.
Tymoshenko's latest initiative about Naftogaz was to break the company into smaller divisions so as to facilitate its management.
In an apparent reference to that plan, Bakai named unspecified 'forces' that wanted to break up Naftogaz and buy up its parts at give-away prices later.
'Remember my words, the one who starts dividing the company will be the one who buys it up,' Bakai said.
Bakai, a forester by education, went into business soon after Ukraine became independent. In 1994, his gas trading company Respublika was authorized by the government to import gas from Turkmenistan. Bakai headed Intergaz, another major gas trader, in 1995-96, and was first deputy chairman of the State Oil and Gas Committee before winning a seat in parliament in the 1998 elections. He gave up his seat when he was appointed head of Naftogaz Ukrainy.
At the March 24 press conference, Bakai said it was the Verkhovna Rada that would likely become his next workplace.
'You are more likely to see me in parliament than in the presidential administration,' he said.
Bakai also has interests in media business, which include the daily newspaper Segodnya and the television channel ICTV.
