History
It was founded on October 16, 1967, after an oil field had been discovered on a small forest clearing in the middle of the taiga marshland in 1961. The main and the only big enterprise in the city, Yuganskneftegaz, was founded in February 1966. The name 'Yugansk' comes from the indigenous Khanty name of a small river near the city, nefte means oil in Russian, and gaz is natural gas. The economy of the city remains petroleum-based, and was a major center for the Russian oil enterprise YUKOS, which owned Yuganskneftegaz. In fact, the "Yu" in "YUKOS" comes from the "yu" in "Nefteyugansk" and therefore from "Yuganskneftegaz". The other three letters come from the oil-refining factory "Kuibyshev-Org-Sintez", situated in Samara.
In June 1998, a city mayor, Vladimir Petukhov, was shot dead on the way to his office. There are two main versions for his murder: some believe Petukhov was shot because he started a conflict with Yukos, with the second version saying mayor was killed by gangsters who operated a local city market, which Petukhov shut down. On September 20, a deputy mayor of Nefteyugansk, Dmitry Yegortsev, was assaulted and wounded with a knife. Another deputy mayor, Igor Gribanov, died in fire at his home in 2006.
Since January 2005, Yuganskneftegaz has been owned by the state-owned oil company Rosneft.
Read more about this topic: Nefteyugansk
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