Adverse court rulings are exhuming Russia’s most infamous expropriation

REMEMBER Yukos, Russia’s biggest oil firm, which was bankrupted by improbable tax claims and then dismembered in bogus auctions? The Russian government would rather that you did not. Although it has expunged Yukos from official registers, the firm’s ghost is haunting the Kremlin and its state oil company, Rosneft, which swallowed Yukos’s assets. In the past few weeks this ghost has been particularly active, making appearances in several European and American courts, demanding retribution and winning injunctions against Rosneft. Earlier this month an English court froze Rosneft’s local assets in a case brought by Yukos Capital, an offshore affiliate of Yukos. A week later a similar freezing order was imposed by a court in Ireland.

This is part of an effort by Yukos’s former managers to enforce an earlier Dutch court ruling that Rosneft should repay a loan of nearly $400m (plus interest and penalties), which it had acquired together with Yukos’s main production assets. The loan dates to 2004, when the Russian authorities simultaneously piled up billions of dollars worth of tax claims on Yukos and froze its assets and bank accounts, making it impossible for the oil company to make any tax payments. …