Yukos offers another proposal to pay its crippling back taxes bill

Russian oil giant Yukos has offered to sell its controlling interest in a gas joint venture with the Anglo-Russian oil company TNK-BP to help settle its crippling back taxes bill.
The sale would raise US$357 million toward the US$3.4 billion claim against Yukos, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported.
The TNK-BP press service confirmed that the company had accepted the offer to buy out Yukos' 56 per cent stake in the Rospan International gas venture.
TNK-BP said that the sale would be legal because Yukos' stake belongs to an offshore subsidiary and therefore is not part of Yukos' Russian assets, which remain frozen under a court order.
A Yukos spokesman said that the company had sent a letter to the government requesting permission for the sale and was still waiting for a response.
Yukos has said that it does not have sufficient funds to pay the back-tax bill and has made repeated requests to the government to spread out payments. The company has also repeatedly complained about the court order freezing its assets which has made it impossible for Yukos to raise funds by selling off peripheral units.
In the letter sent to bailiffs, Yukos lawyers wrote that the money from the sale could be transferred to the bailiffs service by the end of August - before a deadline for payment of the tax bill runs out, Itar-Tass reported.
Though the Kremlin portrays the clampdown on Yukos and the separate trial of its former chief, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, as a move against corruption and shady business practices, many observers say the campaign is retaliation for Khodorkovsky's funding of opposition parties and alleged presidential ambitions.

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