MOSCOW—Russia threatened retaliation against European
state-controlled companies after Belgium and France froze some
Russian assets as part of an effort to enforce a $50 billion
arbitration judgment over the Kremlin's seizing of oil company
Yukos.
Authorities in Belgium and France this week froze some assets
connected with the Russian government, including real estate and
bank accounts, at the behest of shareholders of Mikhail
Khodorkovsky's now-defunct Yukos oil company, which was broken up
and nationalized starting in 2003 by the Russian state. A decision
by a court in The Hague last year said Russia unlawfully dismantled
Yukos through excessive tax claims after Mr. Khodorkovsky fell out
with the Kremlin and was arrested at gunpoint. Russia has disputed
the judgment and says it won't comply.
A representative of former Yukos shareholders said they turned
to individual governments to freeze Russian assets abroad after
Russia made it clear it wouldn't pay compensation, and promised to
take their fight against the Russian government to other countries,
including Germany.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov called the freezing of
assets "illegitimate," saying Russia would retaliate and that
affected companies could turn to Russian courts for justice.
"(The companies) are going to appeal to the Russian courts with
a request in response to these unlawful actions against them to
undertake the same actions in Russia—the arrest of the property of
the state-owned foreign companies," he said in an interview posted
on the Foreign Ministry website Friday.
He said France had briefly frozen the accounts of Russia's
embassy, its Unesco representative office and trade mission, before
lifting the freeze. He said the accounts of some Russian
state-owned companies were still frozen.
A spokeswoman for the Belgian Foreign Ministry declined to
comment. The French Justice Ministry didn't respond to a request
for comment.
GML Ltd., the Gibraltar-registered vehicle through which Mr.
Khodorkovsky and his colleagues held their controlling stake,
however, said it had already appealed to the U.S. and the United
Kingdom to take similar steps. He also said GML would likely turn
to Germany as well.
"We continue to investigate assets... I think over the next
number of years, you can expect to see us rolling this out in new
countries," said Tim Osborne, director of GML.
"We will be starting in Germany pretty shortly. After that
Europe is very attractive because you can reply on the rule of law
applying and it's pretty clear there are assets there."
The court case waged by GML was one of the most costly legal
battles in arbitration history and delivered the largest
arbitration award ever.
Mr. Khodorkovsky, whose Yukos produced more oil than some Gulf
Arab states at the height of its production, said he became a
target after he funded political opposition groups and criticized
high-level corruption in Vladimir Putin's Russia.
Mr. Osborne said the New York Arbitration Convention laid the
legal grounds for the asset freezes, while GML takes its case to
district courts urging them to uphold the decision at a local
level. Favorable local court decisions would ultimately allow them
to seize the frozen real estate and liquidate the bank accounts, he
said.
GML asked authorities in the U.S. and France late last year to
look into the asset freezes and petitioned the United Kingdom
earlier this year. It approached Belgium only this week.
Mr. Osborne said part of the legal proceedings included proving
that the companies in question were not only majority state-owned
companies but also acted as an agent of the state.
He declined to say whether he thought the group would try to
recover the entire compensation sum through asset seizures, but
said they would push forward.
"The actual amount for the moment doesn't really matter, whether
it's $1 billion or $10 billion, it sure as hell ain't $50 billion
so we can keep going."
Inti Landauro contributed to this article
Write to Thomas Grove at thomas.grove@wsj.com
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