Swiss told to seize Yukos cash

[emad]

Nick Paton Walsh in Moscow
Friday March 12, 2004
The Guardian

Russian prosecutors yesterday asked Swiss authorities to seize nearly £3bn held in bank accounts by executives of the Yukos oil company, ratcheting up the Kremlin-backed onslaught against the jailed Russian billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky days before presidential elections.
Bank accounts belonging to 20 Russians, including Mr Khodorkovsky, the former chief executive of Yukos, and two of his colleagues, Platon Lebedev and Leonid Nevzlin, are said to have been frozen.
A spokeswoman for the prosecutors told the Interfax news agency that five accounts at different Swiss banks "holding a total of approximately $5bn (£3bn) were blocked following a request by the Russian prosecutor general's office".

She said it was not related to "assets, shares and other securities, but to personal cash deposits by private individuals somehow or another implicated in the misappropriation of particularly large amounts of state funds". Other accounts belonged to Vladimir Dubov and Mikhail Brudno, two key Yukos shareholders living with Mr Nevzlin in self-imposed exile in Israel. Mr Khodorkovsky, who faces charges of tax evasion and fraud, has been held in custody since his arrest at gunpoint on a Siberian runway in October. The company's shares have been seized, its merger with oil giant Sibneft cancelled, and it has been hit with a $3bn tax bill.

The latest move will be seen as an attempt by the state to reclaim the vast wealth accrued by the oil giant, and will be popular with the Russian electorate. Prosecutors sought to dampen fears that the continued onslaught was part of a larger attempt to revisit the privatisations of state assets that took place in the 90s. Yet the list of oligarchs facing pressure over their tax affairs grew last month when Sibneft - in which Roman Abramovich, the owner of Chelsea, has a major stake - was hit with a $1bn tax bill. The audit chamber, a tax watchdog in the Russian parliament, is expected to complete a comprehensive "review" of the 90s privatisations in the summer, which many feel will increase the pressure on the established "oligarchs" to invest more heavily in Russian society and industry, and contribute more to the Kremlin's coffers.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/russia/article/0,2763,1167641,00.html

Should be an interesting run up to Sunday's general election: one candidate (Putin), one party and all the media owned by the State. Heard it all before somewhere.....