The hoodie that Shearman & Sterling’s Yas Banifatemi wore as she prepared for trial in October 2012 had the Russian word for “Victory” on the back. On the front was the logo of a shirtless Vladimir Putin riding on the wings of a raptor.
Banifatemi was about to second-seat a $114 billion arbitration brought by the majority shareholders of OAO Yukos Oil Company against the Russian Federation. To keep up the spirits of the Shearman team, padding around a hotel in The Hague as they prepped their case, she had sponsored a contest for joke T-shirts and sweatshirts. Some of the other lawyers wore T-shirts displaying Putin as Uncle Sam, pointing his finger and declaring candidly: “I want Yukos!”
That Putin coveted their company was long obvious to Yukos’ majority shareholders. In fall 2003, Russia arrested Yukos chair Mikhail Khodorkovsky. In spring 2004, Russia hit the company with a wave of punitive tax fines. By the end of that year, Yukos’ core asset was in the hands of the state. Following Shearman’s advice, the men who controlled Yukos filed an investor-state arbitration under the Energy Charter Treaty before a panel administered by the Permanent Court of Arbitration. Now, based on a hearing in October and November 2012 at the Peace Palace in The Hague, a panel of three arbitrators headed by L. Yves Fortier would decide whether Putin had truly wanted Yukos—and had violated international law to get it.
In her flying Putin hoodie, the 45-year-old Banifatemi talked trial strategy with her mentor, Emmanuel Gaillard. At 60, the silver-helmeted Gaillard thought he had seen everything in arbitration. A few months earlier he had helped to set a new record for arbitration damages, by winning an award of over $2 billion for Dow Chemical Company against Kuwait. But this was a case on the scale of oligarchical wealth, a fight for the heights of the hydrocarbon economy.
Read our full coverage of Yukos’ $50 billion victory against Russia.
