After expropriation of oil company
Court sentences Russia to a billion-dollar fine
February 20, 2024, 4:54 p.m
In 2006, Russia smashed the oil company Yukos owned by the oligarch and Putin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky. A court then awards shareholders billions in damages. Moscow challenged the verdict in several instances – unsuccessfully.
Russia has suffered a decisive defeat in the billion-dollar dispute with existing shareholders of the smashed oil company Yukos. An appeals court in Amsterdam also rejected Russia’s final objections and ordered the country to pay around $50 billion in damages to former shareholders.
This finally confirmed the ruling of an international arbitration tribunal in 2014. Russia had challenged the decision of the arbitration court based in The Hague in several instances. At the end of 2021, the highest court in the Netherlands referred the matter back to the appeal court for procedural reasons. This now judged. The judges also rejected Russia’s new objection that the shareholders had committed fraud as unfounded.
The former shareholders are now trying to seize Russian property in various countries in order to get their money. The oil and gas company Yukos was owned by the former oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a harsh critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Russia declared the company bankrupt in 2006 because Khodorkovsky allegedly failed to pay billions of euros in taxes. The company was broken up. Khodorkovsky was in prison for ten years.
But shareholders sued and demanded compensation. However, Khodorkovsky was not a party to these Amsterdam proceedings. In 2014, the international arbitration court awarded the former shareholders $50 billion in damages (around €46 billion) because Yukos had been wrongly expropriated. It had stated that the aim was to “eliminate Khodorkovsky as a potential rival to President Putin and to appropriate Yukos’ property.”