Khodorkovsky May Face New Charges — Paper

Former Yukos executives Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev may face new charges in the near future, the Russian Izvestia daily wrote Friday.

Investigators claim that several top executives and shareholders of the Yukos oil company misappropriated assets entrusted to them to the value of $11 billion by selling oil produced by Yukos’ production units to intermediaries.

The prosecutors are set to prove that a scheme of selling oil via offshore firms — widely practiced by Russian companies — is criminal by nature and can be qualified as misappropriation, Izvestia wrote.

The Prosecutor General’s Office launched new criminal proceedings against Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his business partners in October 2004. Khodorkovsky, Vasily Shakhnovsky, Mikhail Brudno, Mikhal Yefremov, Antonio Valdes Garcia, Vladimir Pereverzin and Andrei Leonovich were charged with misappropriation and money laundering.

By that time Khodorkovsky and Lebedev had already been detained and charged with tax evasion and fraud. In mid-May a Moscow court is to pronounce its verdict in their case.

Prosecutors believe that in the years 2002-2003 “an organized criminal group” headed by Khodorkovsky “misappropriated the property entrusted to them and legalized cash and assets”. According to investigators, the group had devised a scheme for stealing profits made by Yukos’ oil producing units — Yuganskneftegaz, Tomskneft, and Samaraneftegaz.

To that end a chain of intermediary firms was established. Prosecutors believe that such practices resulted in the loss of at least $11 billion in profit made by Yukos’ subsidiaries.

The lion’s share of the profits received by the offshore firms was paid out in the form of dividends to their founders — top Yukos executives and shareholders. Prosecutors believe that such actions amount to money laundering.

In March of this year the Prosecutor General’s Office wrote to Tomskneft and Samaraneftegaz suggesting that they recover the profits they failed to receive from Yukos.

Earlier Yuganskneftegaz, a key Yukos asset auctioned off by the government in December and taken over by the state-owned oil firm Rosneft, sued Yukos at the Moscow Arbitration Court for 163 billion rubles. Tomskneft and Samaraneftegaz did not follow its example.

Defense lawyers for Lebedev and Khodorkovsky told Izvestia they did not rule out that their clients could face new charges shortly.

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