I just found out about this over the weekend. Am I wrong to find it a tad sinister?

Donald Evans, the former US Commerce Secretary, is "seriously considering" becoming chairman of Rosneft, the Russian state-owned oil company....

Kommersant, the Russian business daily, reported earlier this week that Mr Evans, the chief executive of the Financial Services Forum, met a number of senior Russian officials during a trip to Moscow last week, including President Vladimir Putin.

...the Financial Times reported that Mr Evans is "seriously considering" taking the Rosneft post.

Rosneft ... is due to combine operations with gas giant Gazprom....

The two companies said yesterday they aim to join forces in gas and oil exploration activities inside Russia. Gazprom also aims to secure 10 per cent of the US natural gas market by 2010 in conjunction with up to three of its western counterparts....

Gazprom also wants to participate in the building of an Iran-Pakistan-India natural gas pipeline. (Yup, that first country I mentioned is Iran.)

More, from that FT article:

Rosneft ... has a controversial reputation abroad following its acquisition of Yuganskneftegaz, the main production arm of Yukos, the oil company built up by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, for $9.35bn (€7.8bn, £6.5bn) in a forced auction last December....

Still more, from Saturday's New York Times:

...Any effort to legitimize Rosneft's assets, however, could meet opposition from Yukos shareholders, still smarting from the loss of the production unit and the jailing of the company's founder, Mikhail B. Khodorkovksy.

"We believe that what happened this time last year was expropriation," Claire Davidson, a spokeswoman for Yukos, said in a phone interview from London, where the company is run by a management team in self-imposed exile.

"When considering an opportunity to be part of the Rosneft board, it's important to consider that a significant number of shareholders, many of them American, have had their rights absolutely taken away from them through the renationalization of a private asset," she said.

Rosneft is entangled in a number of lawsuits with Yukos, and the affair is also under being examined by the European Court of Human Rights, Ms. Davidson said....

The chairmanship of Rosneft is now held by Igor I. Sechin, a Putin loyalist and member of a hard-line faction in the Kremlin known as the siloviki, or men with ties to the secret police, the military or interior ministry troops....

And a lifelong Bush pal wound up in the thick of all this. Ain't life funny sometimes?