Shares in Yukos were suspended today on the Moscow stock exchange after the issue surged 34 per cent following a pledge by President Vladimir Putin not to drive the oil giant into bankruptcy.
“Russian authorities, the government, and the economic officials of our country are not interested in seeing Yukos go bankrupt,” President Putin said at a regional summit in the capital of Uzbekistan.
“The government will try to do try to do everything not to topple this company,” he added.
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Shares in Yukos were suspended from trading on the benchmark RTS index after they soared 25 per cent within less than 30 minutes of Mr Putin’s comments.
Yukos has been pursued by the Russian government over the past year in a campaign that some analysts have argued has been motivated by politics. Yukos’ founder and leading shareholder, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russia’s richest man, helped to finance opposition parties standing for this spring’s presidential elections.
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Mr Khodorkovsky is now on trial on seven counts of fraud and tax evasion. Likewise on trial is Platon Lebedev, the former head of Yukos’ holding company Menatep.
Yukos itself is facing a $3.4 billion tax bill that it says it cannot afford to pay as the Russain authorities have frozen its assets.
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A hearing on the tax bill will be held tomorrow, and if authorities find Yukos guilty of tax evasion and demand immediate payment, the company has warned that it would likely declare bankruptcy.
Mr Putin’s word in the debate has been seen as vital, a point he conceded today.”At this stage, any single word could be interpreted one way or another - by the company’s competitors, its backers, and the company itself,” he said.
However, despite giving government backing to Yukos’s survival, Mr Putin warned that “it is a different matter as to how this case develops in court”.