“HELLO, you’ve called Rosneft,” goes a joke making the rounds in Moscow. “If you have an oil asset and you don’t plan to sell, press the hash key.” The Russian word for hash key, reshetka, also means “bars”, as in jail—where those who cross Rosneft’s head, Igor Sechin, tend to land.

Mr Sechin is one of the most feared men in Russia and an essential instrument of Vladimir Putin’s power. A major player among the siloviki (former and current members of the security services), he epitomises Russia’s nexus between political power and property. Despite being a target of American sanctions, earlier this month he succeeded in selling a 19.5% stake in Rosneft to Glencore, a commodities firm, and the Qatar Investment Fund, raising $11bn. The deal, the biggest foreign investment in Russia since the start of the Ukraine crisis in 2014, pleased the Kremlin no end. “Putin needs that like he needs air,” says Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a sociologist who studies the Russian elite.

Another boost to Mr Sechin’s prestige came with the nomination of Rex Tillerson, the boss of ExxonMobil, as America’s secretary of state. The two men’s long relationship was consummated by the deal they struck in 2011 for their firms to work jointly in the Arctic. Mr Sechin is now poised to become an intermediary between Moscow and Washington.

Mr Sechin has come a long way since the early 1990s, when he was the office co-ordinator for Mr Putin, then deputy mayor of St Petersburg. He owes his rise to his dogged work ethic, his loyalty to the president and his willingness to inflict pain on opponents. “When he first arrived in Moscow no one took him seriously,” says Stanislav Belkovsky, a pundit. “He showed everyone they were wrong.”

Trusty sidekick

A native of Leningrad like Mr Putin, Mr Sechin studied at Leningrad University’s prestigious philology department. As a working-class child, he was “an outsider”, says a classmate. In the 1980s he went to Angola and Mozambique as a military translator (a common cover for intelligence agents, though Mr Sechin has never confirmed being one). He was “upset” when the Soviet Union collapsed, says Nikolai Konyushkov, a college friend.

After Mr Putin became deputy mayor in 1991, Mr Sechin ran his office, keeping a diary where he meticulously recorded the contact details of visitors. “Igor is like that, he loves military discipline and subordination,” says Mr Konyushkov. When Mr Putin moved to Moscow, Mr Sechin trailed behind him at the airport, carrying a duffel bag. “He treated Putin as a god before Putin was a god,” says Konstantin Simonov, head of the National Energy Security Fund, a consultancy in Moscow.

Mr Sechin served as deputy head of Mr Putin’s presidential administration. “To see Putin, you had to go through Sechin,” says a former senior official. In 2004 Mr Putin appointed him head of Rosneft’s board. That is where Mr Tillerson, then an ExxonMobil executive, would first have seen him in operation. In 2003 ExxonMobil had been negotiating with Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the head of Yukos, Russia’s largest oil firm at the time, to buy 40% of the company. Instead Mr Khodorkovsky was arrested and jailed for ten years, and in 2004 Yukos was dismembered by the state, its assets swallowed by Rosneft. Mr Khodorkovsky claimed Mr Sechin was the driving force behind the attack.

The Yukos affair empowered the siloviki in the Kremlin. Unlike the oligarchs of the 1990s, who aimed to maximise their profits, the siloviki simply wanted control. And whereas Mr Sechin’s conflict with Mr Khodorkovsky was partly personal, Rosneft’s later takeover of Bashneft, a mid-sized oil producer, was pure business.

In 2014 Bashneft’s owner, Vladimir Yevtushenkov, was arrested after reportedly rebuffing Mr Sechin’s offer for the company. (Rosneft denies making any offers or having any involvement in the arrest.) Mr Yevtushenkov was released after he agreed to give up control. Initially Lukoil, Russia’s largest private oil firm, was seen as the most likely buyer; Alexei Ulyukaev, the economy minister, called Rosneft “unsuitable”. But Mr Sechin got Mr Putin’s support and paid $5.3bn for the state’s stake in October. “The strongest one won,” says Leonid Fedun, Lukoil’s vice-president. The following month Mr Ulyukaev was arrested while allegedly accepting a bribe during a sting operation in Rosneft’s offices.

Rosneft’s links to Russia’s secret police, the FSB, work through “secondment”, a Soviet-era tradition restored by Mr Putin. Officers work undercover at important institutions, state or private. The operation against Mr Ulyukaev, for example, was led by Oleg Feoktistov, a senior FSB officer who became head of security at Rosneft.

Oil spillover

Mr Sechin has been equally active abroad, where he sees Rosneft as a vehicle of geopolitical influence. “They’re trying to create a strong foundation, hence the consolidation inside Russia, from which to expand,” says James Henderson of the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. Rosneft has signed partnerships with ExxonMobil, Eni, and Statoil. A $270bn supply deal with China’s CNPC has helped resolve Rosneft’s cash-flow problem. More recently, Rosneft has invested in refineries in India; in natural gas in Egypt; and in a joint crude-processing venture in Venezuela. “He is looking at ExxonMobil and BP and Shell [as a model],” says a former Rosneft executive.

What matters to Mr Sechin is size, not value. His doctoral dissertation in 1998 on oil transport networks drips with contempt for market forces. Whereas market economies evaluate projects based on expected returns on investment, Mr Sechin praised the Soviet nuclear-weapons and space programmes, which he said operated on a different principle: “at any price necessary”.

Running Rosneft has made Mr Sechin a very rich man. His salary, including bonuses, ran to as much as $11.8m in 2015. As stories about his allegedly lavish lifestyle have appeared in the Russian press, he has struck back. So far this year, Mr Sechin has won libel cases against the Russian publications Vedomosti, Novaya Gazeta, and RBC, a leading business publication. Mr Sechin is seeking to “become an untouchable topic, like the president’s family”, says Derk Sauer, a vice-president at Onexim, which owns RBC. “He feels himself to be a very important guy, a representative of the state, and anything you write can be perceived as an attack on the state.”