(Reuters) - The Hague's arbitration court ruled on Monday that Russia must pay a group of shareholders in oil giant Yukos $50.02 billion for expropriating its assets, a big hit for a country teetering on the brink of recession.
The arbitration panel in the Netherlands said it had awarded shareholders in the GML group just under half of their $114 billion claim, going some way to covering the money they lost when the Kremlin seized Yukos, once controlled by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a decade ago.
"The award is a slam dunk. It is for $50 billion, and that cannot be disputed," said Tim Osborne, director of GML. "It's now a question of enforcing it."
Russia's Finance Ministry called the ruling "flawed", "one-sided" and "politically biased" and said it would appeal the decision. It comes as Russia and the West are in their biggest stand-off since the Cold War over Moscow's actions in Ukraine.
Russia argued that the court ignored tax violations by Yukos and said it was senseless and speculative to value Yukos so long after the events. Lawyers, however, said there were only limited grounds on which to appeal.
The panel of judges, which has been reviewing the case since 2005, concluded that officials under President Vladimir Putin had manipulated the legal system to bankrupt Yukos.
"Yukos was the object of a series of politically motivated attacks by the Russian authorities that eventually led to its destruction," the court said. "The primary objective of the Russian Federation was not to collect taxes but rather to bankrupt Yukos and appropriate its valuable assets."
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This will probably strain the relations between Russia and the West in general and the Netherlands in particular even more. I also don't think it very likely that Russia is really going to pay the - considerable - amount to the suers. It might even flat out refuse.
