President Vladimir Putin left global oil executives in little doubt as to who was the master of the world's largest energy reserves at Russia's answer to Davos. The sky over St Petersburg was turning white at the end of the longest day of the year, and the financiers and leaders of global industry who had gathered as Putin's guests at this year's forum were retiring to lavish parties and rooftop bars.
But the chief executives of BP, ConocoPhillips , Shell and Chevron stood with a dozen colleagues in a dark, chairless foyer, shifting from foot to foot on Thursday as they waited three hours for an audience. "No one was angry," said a European chief executive as he whiled away the wait by hashing out an equipment issue with a colleague. "There was a lot to talk about."
Putin has kept them waiting in the past, both for meetings and for deals, sometimes for years as they struggled to find a way in with a government that controls access to some of the world's largest untapped oil and gas reserves. Putin, whose conviction that strategic resources should be in the hands of the state was laid out in his doctoral dissertation, has shown a willingness in the past few months to share prospective oil riches on a scale unprecedented since Russia's early post-Soviet years.
Three Arctic drilling deals, personally brokered by energy tsar Igor Sechin in the final days of Putin's four-year spell as prime minister, have opened up new possibilities after a decade in which Russia became a byword for resource nationalism. The appeal of advanced Western technology needed to tap increasingly remote and challenging fields, and the attendant promise of a more modern, healthy economy has chipped away at the Kremlin's jealous guard of its natural resources. It has also set off debate around long-standing tax policies that are designed to skim off oil industry revenues but have proven costly in terms of investment in new barrels.