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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (193507)	7/7/2004 1:01:02 PM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1577836

Russian Government Begins Seizing Yukos Assets By Peter Baker and Susan B. Glasser Washington Post Foreign Service Wednesday, July 7, 2004; 12:50 PM MOSCOW, July 7 -- The Russian government moved Wednesday to begin seizing assets of Yukos Oil Co. in the culmination of a politically charged tax battle that could either bankrupt or break up the country's largest oil producer. Court marshals accompanied by special police forces raided the company's registry office in Moscow at the end of the business day to search for ownership documents for various Yukos properties. The marshals were enforcing last week's court judgment giving Yukos a Wednesday deadline to pay a $3.4 billion back tax bill. Yukos said this week that it had no more than $1.4 billion in cash and could not pay the full charge in time without an installment plan. Yukos reportedly offered to turn over some or all of the controlling stake owned by the company's imprisoned chief shareholder, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and his partners, but all attempts at negotiations appeared to have failed so far. "The debtor was given a five-day deadline for voluntary execution, after which the court bailiffs service of the city of Moscow began to enforce the court decision," the Russian Justice Ministry said in a statement carried by the Interfax news service after the raid began. The ministry statement immediately threatened a new criminal investigation and obstruction charges against officials at Yukos' registry for allegedly trying to avoid cooperating with the marshals who arrived at their building. Authorities can seize the company's assets and either keep them to satisfy the tax debt or sell them off. But it is possible they were not able to find the right documents at the office of the registry, a firm called Reyester-M. Yukos said registry documents of its subsidiaries in Siberia and along the Volga River were transferred last week after the court ruling, apparently to those regions. washingtonpost.com