Theede and former Yukos executives have been battling state-controlled oil company Rosneft over Yukos since 2003, when its founder, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was detained and imprisoned in Siberia for tax evasion.
‘More Restrictions’
After the arrest, tax authorities saddled Yukos, at the time the country’s biggest taxpayer, according to Yukos Library spokeswoman Claire Davidson, with a charge of more than $3 billion in tax liabilities. Declared bankrupt by a Moscow court in 2005, Yukos was ordered broken up and sold to Rosneft.
Theede and his managers began moving Yukos assets into a network of offshore subsidiaries in April 2005, placing control of the company’s non-Russian holdings into a Dutch foundation that Rosneft lawyers called a “faceless, ownerless entity,” according a 2010 legal filing in the British Virgin Islands Commercial Court.
In the action, Rosneft lawyers said that they had won control of the subsidiaries, and their profits would only be paid when the directors “found it fit to do so.” The case remains unsettled. Darya Ermolina, a spokeswoman for Rosneft in Moscow, didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Swiss attorney Tutykhin said Russian billionaires will continue to hold their main assets out of Russia, even in the face of Putin’s tough talk.
“Cash transfers from Russia will become more complicated, and there will be more control over cash inflows into the country,” he said. “The more restrictions on money flows Russian authorities will impose, the more reasons Russia’s rich would have to hold their assets abroad.”