Partial victory for Russia. The Dutch Supreme Court has suspended this Friday the payment of 43,000 million euros imposed on Moscow for the bankruptcy of the Russian oil company Yukos. This is the latest legal turn in a litigation that began in 2014, when the Permanent Court of Arbitration –based in The Hague– considered that the Russian Federation “attacked the Yukos company for political reasons, because its owner, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, began to become an opponent of President Putin ”. The arbitrators then concluded that Russia should pay Yukos majority shareholders $ 50 billion (about € 43 billion). The Supreme Court ruling sends the case back to the Court of Appeal for review in a new trial that will decide whether there was a share fraud, as Moscow maintains. The oil company was declared bankrupt in 2006 and later expropriated by the government of President Vladimir Putin.
The judicial coming and going of the Yukos case in the Netherlands it has ended up hitting a procedural question. The Appellate judges will have to rule again on the interpretation given in 2020 to the alleged fraud. This process can take several years. This Friday, Tim Osborne, CEO of GML, the company that brings together the former shareholders of Yukos, has issued a statement in which he states that “we have won in all substantive matters and we trust that the Amsterdam Court of Appeal will reject the allegations of the Russian Federation and the compensation can be maintained ”. The Russian Attorney General’s office regrets in a note that the Dutch Supreme Court “has not completely rejected” the decision of the Permanent Court of Arbitration.
Yukos was owned by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who has not participated in the case. After spending more than 10 years in prison in his country, the businessman was released in 2013 “for humanitarian reasons” and now lives in exile in London. Its shares were sold to the Russian state company Rosneft. The decision on the case comes at a time of tension between the Netherlands and Russia, also faced in court over the tragedy of flight MH17 and the return of the Crimean gold, exhibited in 2014 in Amsterdam shortly before the annexation of the peninsula by part of Russia.
The Permanent Court of Arbitration is not a common court but a body that resolves disputes arising from international treaties between countries and individuals. In his technical presentation, in 2014, he said that Russia had violated “the Energy Charter Treaty (1994) with the expropriation of Yukos.” It was a historic decision for the amount of compensation, the largest since its foundation – in 1899 – against a sovereign State. Moscow filed an appeal claiming that the Energy Charter Treaty had not been ratified and was only applied provisionally in Russia, and the Dutch courts reversed the decision of the Permanent Court of Arbitration in 2016. The argument made was that the arbitrators had no jurisdiction in this case. In another unexpected twist, in 2020, that ruling was voided on appeal, also in the Netherlands. Hence it continued its course to the Supreme. During all this time, the payment has not been made.
Yukos was the largest private company to emerge after the demise of the Soviet Union, and Khodorkovsky’s arrest showed President Putin’s rejection of the presence of powerful businessmen on the political scene. When Khodorkovsky fell, Yukos disintegrated before the high taxes demanded by the Russian Government. It ended up being sold at auction to state firms between 2004 and 2006. From then on, the former majority shareholders sought a way to be compensated. Despite what has been decided in the Dutch Supreme Court, it will be years before they can recover – if necessary – their money.
Flight MH17 was shot down in July 2014 when it was flying over Ukraine. Its 298 occupants perished, 196 of them Dutch. The Malaysian airlines plane was covering the route between Amsterdam and Kuala Lumpur and crashed in the Donetsk region. An area of armed conflict between the Kiev government and pro-Russian pro-independence insurgents. Three Russian suspects and a Ukrainian are being tried – in absentia because they have not appeared – for the downing of the device with a Buk missile carried from Russia to Ukraine. This October, another Dutch court concluded that the Crimean gold, a treasure made up of about a thousand historical pieces from the Crimean peninsula, must return to Ukraine. Exposed in 2014 in Amsterdam, when it was to be returned to a Ukrainian museum and four others opened in Crimea, the annexation of the peninsula by Russia took place. The judges have resolved to return the works to Kiev, as it was “the sovereign state that authorized their departure” for the exhibition.
Join EL PAÍS now to follow all the news and read without limits
Subscribe here
Follow all the international information at Facebook and Twitter, or in our weekly newsletter.
#Dutch #Supreme #Court #suspends #Russias #millionaire #payment #Yukos #shareholders