YUKOS Denies Plans to Sell Refinery

Russian oil major YUKOS denied on Wednesday reports it planned to sell its Lithuanian refinery Mazeikiu Nafta to help cover its huge back tax bill.

"We have no plans to sell our strategic assets, including Mazeikiu," YUKOS' spokesman Alexander Shadrin told Reuters.

Vedomosti business daily reported on Wednesday that YUKOS plans to sell Mazeikiu, which also includes a 200,000 barrels-per-day crude oil export terminal in Butinge on the Baltic Sea, to raise more cash toward covering back taxes.

Vedomosti quoted sources as saying that YUKOS was in talks to sell its 53.6 percent stake in the complex and several Russian companies had already expressed interest in buying it.

One source said Mazeikiu Nafta assets were not under arrest as YUKOS does not own them directly.

YUKOS missed last month's deadline to pay $3.4 billion in back taxes for 2000 saying it had managed to raise only $2 billion.

On Tuesday, the Tax Ministry also started to collect $2.72 billion from YUKOS' bank accounts out of its total claim of $4.1 billion for 2001 back taxes.

YUKOS' tax woes are part of a broader campaign seen by many analysts as orchestrated by the Kremlin to punish the company's politically ambitious founder Mikhail Khodorkovsky, now on trial on fraud and tax evasion charges.

Mazeikiu turned profitable last year after being taken over by YUKOS in 2002. It refined more than 3.9 million tonnes of crude and other feedstock in the first six months of the year, or more than 154,500 barrels per day. It is over 1 million tonnes more than in the same year-ago period.

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