Vladimir Soprano

Some of the world’s major energy companies are learning a hard lesson about President Vladimir Putin’s Russia. It is the same lesson that Putin’s political opponents have absorbed, along with independent journalists, human rights activists, and certain oligarchs who fell afoul of the plutocratic KGB veterans who form Putin’s inner circle.

Royal Dutch Shell and its Japanese partners, the Mitsui and Mitsubishi companies, learned it when they were forced to sell a majority share in Sakhalin-2, the world’s largest combined oil and natural gas development project, to the state-controlled Russian company Gazprom. They learned that the Kremlin’s way of doing business bears a striking resemblance to Tony Soprano’s.
Boston Globe