Analyst Suspects Yukos Is Behind Minority Shareholders

Yukos Oil Company has been hit with another lawsuit from its U.S. minority shareholders. On Monday, August 9, Glancy Binkow & Goldberg (GBG) law firm filed a lawsuit against Yukos, its major shareholders Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Platon Lebedev and Vasily Shakhnovsky, and the company’s CFO Bruce Misamore, Russian Kommersant daily reported. The law firm’s clients who stand behind the lawsuit accuse Yukos of falsifying accounts and demand the compensation of losses that were incurred by minority shareholders.

The lawsuit filed by GBG law firm is a ninth such class action lawsuit filed against Yukos within the last month. It is expected that all nine suits will be registered in New York’s Southern Court in the middle of September. At that point they may be united into one mega-lawsuit.

Alexander Shadrin, Yukos’ press secretary told the newspaper that the oil company has no worries about yet another lawsuit. “Our U.S. lawyers are taking care of this,” said Shadrin. “We hope that unlike in Russia, justice will persevere in the United States.”

Meanwhile Robert Ebel, Director of the Energy Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told reporters that it is possible that Yukos itself is behind this massive attack from the minority shareholders. “I don’t exclude the possibility that minority shareholders consulted Yukos before filing their lawsuits,” said Ebel. “In reality these lawsuits are profitable to Yukos at the moment.”

HERE