The taxes on added value and profit are his chief witnesses.

Platon Lebedev has formally complained to the Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor General's office that the “accusations that he ‘misappropriated’ all the oil extracted by Yukos and its subsidiaries are knowingly false”.

“The payment into the State budget of value added tax (VAT) is convincing evidence of the efficiency of ... the oil-producing enterprises of Yukos. If a profit was made, in the process, and the enterprise paid tax on that profit, this provides convincing evidence of effective management of the company’s oil-producing enterprises (in our case, Yukos-EP Ltd) and fulfilment of the tasks laid down in the companies’ statutes. [...]

“Considering the economic activities of oil-producing enterprises, we can state that if all the oil they extracted was ‘misappropriated’, as the investigation falsely claims, then, a priori, they could not have covered their costs, let alone made a profit. Such enterprises, automatically, would have been declared bankrupt and — if we follow the schizophrenic logic of the investigation — this should have found reflection and confirmation in the tax returns and financial records of, say, Yuganskneftegaz plc, the Yukos holding company’s largest oil-producing enterprise. [...]

“Accordingly, I request that a formal demand be immediately issued for the tax returns of Yukos oil-producing enterprises (Yuganskneftegaz plc, Samaraneftegaz plc and Tomskneft plc) to be supplied for the period 1998 to 2004, demonstrating payment of VAT and the tax on profit, and that they be added to the case documentation.”