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Posted Sunday, November 2, 2003; 13.45GMT
The arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky on charges of embezzlement, theft and tax evasion is related to the 1994 sale of the Apatit fertilizer factory in Kirovsk, a small town in northern Russia's Murmansk region.
According to Natalia Vishnyakova, a spokeswoman for the prosecutor general's office, Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev, head of Group MENATEP, Yukos' parent company, are accused of defrauding the Murmansk regional administration by selling Apatit to offshore firms at a cut-rate price. Vishnyakova also says that in 1999 and 2000 Yukos organized a tax evasion scheme that cost the government over $1 billion in lost revenue.
"These charges are totally unsubstantiated," says Khodorkovsky's defense lawyer, Anton Drel. Mikhail Krutikhin, an analyst at RusEnergy, Russia's oil and gas consulting company, says Yukos simply exploited the existence of tax havens in several Russian provinces for as long as they legally existed. "Should they be prosecuted for doing that now," Krutikhin says, "it means that any business in Russia is on its way to jail."
...Or Was It This >>
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