An international tribunal in The Hague has awarded the shareholders of the now-defunct Yukos oil company about $US50 billion ($53 billion), in ruling on claims that the Russian government illegally seized the company from one of the country’s most powerful oligarchs.
‘‘We are thrilled with this decision, although we know it is not the end of the road,’’ said Tim Osborne, director of GML, the holding company created by Yukos founder Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
Russia has said it will appeal the court's decision.
The verdict by a three-judge arbitration panel is an important development in a saga that began in 2003 when Russian authorities arrested Khodorkovsky, Russia’s richest man at the time, and began breaking up and selling off his main asset, Yukos Oil.
For the past decade, Yukos shareholders have been fighting in courts outside Russia for compensation. Khodorkovsky, who has always contended that the charges of embezzlement and tax fraud brought against him were baseless and politically motivated, was pardoned by President Vladimir Putin last year, after having spent about 10 years in jail.
The ruling concerned a case brought in 2005 in The Hague by former majority shareholders of Yukos under the provisions of the 1994 Energy Charter Treaty, which sets rules for cross-border energy transactions. Russia signed the treaty but never ratified it.
Russia could challenge the ruling by saying it was not bound by the treaty, although it had pledged to abide by it. Before the ruling, the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, said Moscow would consider appealing a decision in favour of the shareholders, Reuters reported.
The shareholders were seeking compensation from the Russian government for $US100 billion in damages, their estimation of the value of Yukos in 2007, when it was liquidated.
The Russian government had charged the company with tax evasion that caused its stock price to collapse three years earlier.
It is unlikely Khodorkovsky will benefit financially from the verdict, as he says he handed over his stake to a partner, Leonid Nevzlin, who lives in Israel, in 2005. In addition to Nevzlin, the claimants include Platon Lebedev, Vasily Shakhnovsky, Mikhail Brudno and Vladimir Dubov, as well as a pension fund set up by GML on the behalf of about 30,000 former Yukos employees.
