Entrepreneur taps into his own supply go black gold

The unnamed 52 year old Siberian 'human mole' used his secret underground passage to steal from the Omsk-Irkutsk pipeline. His audacious theft led to him obtaining 30 tons of crude oil Transsibneft, a subsidiary of Russian oil pipeline monopoly Transneft, over a three month period. The oil was valued at $16,200.

But it also got him arrested for large-scale theft.

The tunnel in the Moshkovskiy district of Novosibirsk region had taken him three years to construct, at weekends and after work, and his arrest evidently left him furious at being unable to extract more oil as reward for his efforts.

With no expertise, he read up on how to build tunnels - and it was tall enough for a man to stand in, linking land beside his home to the oil source. 

'A businessman working in the freight traffic industry dug a 60-meter underground tunnel to steal crude oil. He crawled through the tunnel, made a tie-in and connected a hose to it,' said a police spokesman. 

'The man confessed that stealing the crude had turned out to be difficult on a practical level, as the fuel was always overflowing, soiling his clothes.'

The man works in the freight traffic industry but has not been named. He explained his driving force was not theft but scientific curiosity. 

'My goal was just to see if I could do it or not. I once came across one man's thesis. I read it and that was my starting point,' he said.

He risked his life, working with basic tools such as a shovel. 

'The process was hard. The soil was really troublesome. It appeared to be hard to dig. Water was constantly leaking. There was a lot of fuss,' he told RT, complaining that he had to put up with dirty clothes because of the digging. 

He was unlucky to be caught, said the businessman. Police are trying to identify others in the sale of the oil.