"My message is very simple; if you can invest in Gazprom, do it now," the $115 billion company's Deputy Chairman Alexander Medvedev told an audience of U.S. officials, policy analysts, diplomats and academics in Washington Friday.

"We want to liberalize share ownership to eliminate restrictions on foreign capital," Medvedev told the interested but often skeptical audience at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think tank, who asked pointed questions about the 51 percent control kept by the Russian state, and about Gazprom's use of energy price subsidies for political purposes.

One questioner noted that the same message, that the cleaned-up and reformed Russian energy industry was open for business and Western investment, had been delivered to the same audience two years earlier by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the tycoon of the Yukos energy giant, who this week started his 8-year prison term in a Siberian labor camp after what was widely seen in the West as a political trial.

"In future, better pay your taxes in full," snapped a grim-faced Medvedev, who had briefly worked for Yukos when it took over another Russian oil company where he was vice-president.

"I never faced such cynical fraud and exploitation or resources," he added, suggesting Khodorkovsky should not be seen as a martyr for private enterprise.

Other questioners asked why Gazprom would spend more money to build a submarine pipeline through the Baltic Sea, if not to threaten Poland and the Baltic states with the withholding of gas supplies. Another asked about Gazprom's bid to double the amount Ukraine paid for its gas to $125 per 1,000 cubic meters after the Orange revolution elected a less pro-Russian government in Kiev, while the pro-Russian and authoritarian Belarus regime paid only $46.

Medvedev is not only the deputy chairman of Gazprom, but also runs its crucial export arm, Gazpromexport, and Washington policy-makers and oil industry officials were keen to get a close-up look at the man who controls the sale of 20 percent of world gas production, and more energy reserves than Saudi Arabia's Aramco.

Medvedev made no secret of Gazprom's global ambitions, and its commitment to "vertical integration," by which he meant controlling as much as possible from the well-head in Siberia to the eventual customer in Texas or Tokyo. Gazprom planned to increase its production from its new fields, to enhance its transport facilities, mainly the pipelines its own or leases that snake across Europe from Russia to Britain, and also to boost sales and marketing in the new markets of the U.S. and Asia.

"It is a win-win situation for us and for the United States," he said. "An energy bridge between our countries creates good relations."

Gazprom has ridden the oil price boom with great success, its market capitalization soaring from $33 billion in 2003 to $67 billion last year to $115 billion now. But to develop its big new fields in Sakhalin, off the Pacific coast to the north of Japan, and the Shtokman field in the Barents Sea north of Siberia, it needs more capital and Western partners. And Medvedev made it clear that he felt he was in a strong position to drive a hard bargain.

Five Western groups have been short-listed to help develop the Shtokman field, which contains 113 trillion cubic feet of gas -- enough for 25 years of Russian gas exports to Europe. The five are Chevron, Phillips-Conoco, Statoil and Hydro from Norway, and France's Total. Two, or at most three, would be picked as partners, Medvedev said, and "the final decision will rest on access to downstream and midstream facilities."

This means that the successful Western partners will have to be ready to share their distribution and marketing networks with Gazprom.

Medvedev made it clear he was prepared to be tough with former Soviet customers. One questioner from the former Soviet republic of Georgia asked about price policies.

"You cannot talk about free markets on the one hand, and then start expecting us to behave in old Communist way," Medvedev said, rejecting the idea of preferential pricing or subsidies -- though he also said the preferential pricing regime for Belarus would remain "as long as Belarus fulfills its obligations."

The sharp questioning and evident skepticism from some of the audience did not quite detract from the grand design that Medvedev sought to describe, for U.S. consumers in an energy-hungry world to turn to a reliable and experienced Russian supplier, whose vast Shtokman field is also the closest of the giant natural gas fields to the U.S. market.

Gazprom had already started supplying the U.S., Medvedev said, citing the delivery of 138,000 cubic meters of Liquified Natural Gas this year to a terminal at Cove Point, Maryland, although in fact the gas came from Egypt.

Medvedev dismissed concerns about the Gazprom monopoly and political concerns raising a question about the reliability of dependence on Russian energy supplies. There was no monopoly possible in the international energy market, Medvedev insisted, saying that in Europe Gazprom faced competition from Algeria, Britain, Norway and other gas suppliers, and that Gazprom was "interdependent" with its customers.

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