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,
neft' 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. On June 26, 1998, city mayor
Vladimir Petukhov was shot dead on the way to his office. Before his murder, Petukhov had been on a
hunger strike demanding that the chairmen of municipal and district tax offices be dismissed from their positions and a criminal case against Yukos be filed on counts of
tax evasion. Petukhov's widow later on called for an investigation into
Mikhail Khodorkovsky's role in events. Back then Khodorkovsky was head of Yukos. On September 20, 2005 Dmitry Yegortsev, acting mayor of Nefteyugansk, was assaulted and wounded with a knife. After the stabbing of Yegortsev,
Igor Gribanov took over City Hall as acting mayor. Just a few months later, he died of carbon monoxide poisoning at his home on January 6, 2006. Since January 2005, Yuganskneftegaz has been owned by the state-owned oil company
Rosneft. The mayor of Nefteyugansk is Sergey Dektyarev. ==Administrative and municipal status==