RIA Novosti, 24 June 2008

Russian investigators confirmed on Tuesday that embezzlement and money laundering charges had been brought against the former heads of subsidiaries of the now bankrupt Yukos oil company.

Yury Volkov and Anna Tuchkina, the heads of Gonkar Investment and the Audiyentsiya company, were charged with embezzling and laundering 276 million rubles ($11.7 million) in 2004 after Yukos founder Mikhail Khodorkovsky's arrest on fraud and tax evasion charges.

Investigators said the money was used to pay Khodorkovsky's legal bills.

The Kommersant daily said on Tuesday that Volkov and Tuchkina were initially witnesses in the case against their former chief, Igor Goncharov, who was sentenced in 2005 to 13 years in prison for his role in embezzling and laundering Yukos funds.

The Investigation Committee at the Prosecutor General's Office said the suspects had opened bogus charity organizations across the country in 2004, using the organizations to transfer hundreds of millions of rubles of Yukos funds.

"The money was then cashed and sent to Mikhail Trushin, vice president of Yukos Moskva," said Vladimir Markin, in charge of the committee's press service. "Volkov and Tuchkina thereby stole 276 million rubles."

Trushin fled to London in 2004 and has since been on the wanted list in Russia.

Similar charges were also brought against autocross car racer Vladimir Sorochinsky. He was charged with stealing 20 million rubles (about $846,000) from Yukos as part of a complicated scheme involving financial assistance for his auto club.

The suspects have not been taken into detention, but have given a written pledge not to leave their places of residence.

Commenting on the charges, their lawyers said, as quoted by Kommersant, that investigators had decided "to squeeze some more dividends from the long-running and high-profile case."

The probe against the chief and other executives of what was once Russia's largest independent oil producer was widely criticized in the West and seen as part of the Kremlin's drive to regain lucrative energy assets. Khodorkovsky said the charges were 'punishment' for his support of the country's tiny opposition movement.

Dow Jones, By Gregory White, 24 June 2008

PricewaterhouseCoopers LLC won a reprieve from a Russian appeals court Monday in a closely watched case in which lower courts ruled the auditor was an active participant in tax evasion at now-bankrupt oil giant OAO Yukos.

Overturning a lower-court order issued in January, the Federal Arbitration Court for the Moscow District ruled that PWC's Russian unit has the right to appeal the ruling against it.

Yukos, once Russia's largest oil company, was slapped with tens of billions of dollars in back-tax claims and largely nationalized in a case that several foreign courts have ruled was a politically motivated attack on its billionaire owner, Mikhail Khodorkovsky. He is serving an eight-year prison term for tax evasion.

PWC was Yukos's auditor. After facing back-tax claims of its own, as well as other official pressure, the firm last year withdrew its audits of the oil giant, which had endorsed Yukos's tax strategies.

But PWC's legal problems persisted, as appeals courts upheld the ruling that it actively aided Yukos's tax evasion from 2002 to 2004.

That judgment could have threatened Pricewaterhouse's auditing license in Russia, though regulators so far have made no move against the group.

"We are pleased that the decision provides us a further opportunity to defend our position in the appeals court," a PWC spokeswoman said in an emailed statement, referring to Monday's ruling. "We have always maintained that the claim has no legal merits."

The firm also is preparing an appeal to the Supreme Arbitration Court of its own back-tax claims.