tycoon Khodorkovsky's Yukos. He has additionally been president of Rosneft since May 2012. Khodorkovsky has accused Sechin of plotting to have him arrested and plundering his oil company: "The second as well as the first case were organised by Sechin. He orchestrated the first case against me out of greed and the second out of cowardice." In 2008, Sechin allegedly blocked the replacement of the AAR consortium with Gazprom in the TNK-BP joint venture. In 2008, Sechin was involved with the BP oil company and did private negotiations with the BP's CEO Bob Dudley. In 2008, Hugo Chávez said that the idea for Venezuelan nuclear energy program came from Sechin. Sechin negotiated deals on weapons and nuclear technology deliveries to Venezuela. In July 2009, Sechin negotiated deals with Cuba that brought Russia into deep-water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. Sechin also presides over the Board of Directors of the United Shipbuilding Corporation, and helped with negotiations with France over the purchase of four Mistral-class ships. Sechin argued that two ships should be constructed in Russia and two in France, as opposed to the initial offer that only one be constructed in Russia. Piotr Żochowski, of the Polish Center for Eastern Studies, argued that "it cannot be ruled out that Sechin's stance on this issue results from his personal financial involvement in the St Petersburg shipbuilding industry". On 12 April 2011, Sechin resigned from the board of Rosneft upon President Medvedev's 31 March 2011 order for senior officials to resign from large companies. After Vladimir Putin became President of Russia in May 2012, he later resigned as vice prime minister on 21 May 2012 and rejoined the executive board of Rosneft as chairman and became the executive secretary for the Russia Federation's commission on the development strategy of the fuel and energy complex and environmental safety () in June. In December 2014, a CNBC article noted that Sechin is "widely believed to be Russia's second-most powerful person" after President Putin. In December 2017, The Guardian noted that Sechin "is widely seen as the second most powerful man in Russia after Vladimir Putin". The Steele dossier alleged that Sechin met with Carter Page in 2016 as a representative of the Donald Trump presidential campaign, and offered Trump the brokerage of a 19.6% private share in Rosneft in exchange for lifting sanctions imposed following the 2014 Russian intervention in Ukraine. The 2019