Rosneft complied with the law regarding Yukos assets and doesn’t expect the decision to “negatively affect its commercial activity or assets,” the oil producer said in a website statement. Gazprom declined to comment.

The Yukos shareholders have the right to go after state assets if Russia doesn’t pay, Osborne said. “I don’t think that Rosneft can be 100 percent confident that all their assets in the West will be secure,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg Television.

Russia will have an opportunity to appeal, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said today at a televised briefing. “Russia will use all available legal means to defend its position,” he said.

Russia will probably refuse to pay the damages, and seizing state assets abroad will be a difficult task, according to Gololobov.

“Russia has the money to hire the best international lawyers, who won’t give up without a fight,” Gololobov said by e-mail before the ruling was announced. “So the Yukos affair could easily go on for another 10 years.”

Politically Motivated

Khodorkovsky, once Russia’s richest man with a fortune of $15 billion, was freed in December under a presidential pardon after serving a decade in prison camps. He has called the charges against him revenge for his financing of opposition parties. The Kremlin denies the claim, saying it was purely a matter for the courts.

The ruling found that “that the primary objective of the Russian Federation was not to collect taxes but to bankrupt Yukos and appropriate its underlying assets for the benefit of the state in the guise of Rosneft,” Osborne said.

Khodorkovsky, who’s living in Switzerland, said he isn’t entitled to any part of the damages because he transferred his Yukos stake to fellow shareholder Leonid Nevzlin to protect the company when he became a target of the Russian courts.

Nevzlin is beneficial owner of slightly more than 70 percent of GML, while four other partners -- Platon Lebedev, Mikhail Brudno, Vladimir Dubov and Vasily Shakhnovsky -- each have a little less than 7.5 percent. GML used to own 60 percent of Yukos.