‘Unknown company’ buys Yukos unit for €7bn

AN unknown company Baikal Finance Group has been declared winner of an auction for Russian oil firm YUKOS’s main production unit, after outbidding gas monopoly and favourite Gazprom.

Baikal, named after a freshwater lake in Siberia, bid €7 billion for Yuganskneftegaz yesterday.

Gazprom said it was not linked to Baikal but analysts said they suspected the gas giant might have had a hand in the winning bid.

The sale of Yuganskneftegaz, which pumps more oil than OPEC member Qatar, went ahead in defiance of a US court order barring Gazprom and its foreign bankers from bidding, pending further proceedings in Yukos’s application for US Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

Yukos is widely seen by analysts as the victim of a Kremlin campaign to crush its politically ambitious owner, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and to seize control of strategic sectors of the economy sold off in the chaotic privatisations of the 1990s.

Mr Khodorkovsky is now on trial for fraud and tax evasion and faces 10 years in jail if convicted.

Gazprom had put in an opening offer for 76.79% of Yugansk representing 100% of voting interests at the minimum sale price of €6.6bn but withdrew after Baikal made the winning bid.

The auction was ordered to raise funds to help pay Yukos’s €20bn back-tax bill, the result of a relentless assault by the authorities which analysts say is aimed at breaking up the company.

A Yukos spokesman said whoever was behind the winning bid would be pursued through the law courts.

“The company considers that the victor of today’s auction has bought itself a serious $9bn dollar headache,” said spokesman Alexander Shadrin. “Those who stand behind the winner have subjected their business to considerable legal risks. We declare that the sale of Yugansk is illegal,” he said.

Hours before the auction, lawyers for Menatep, a group through which Mr Khodorkovsky and his associates control Yukos, pledged to extend their fight against the sell-off to other countries. They said they would seek injunctions in foreign courts impounding Russian oil and gas exports.

Menatep head Tim Osborne said after the auction that Yugansk’s new owners were “on notice that this is an illegal expropriation.”