Lord Owen was chairman of Yukos International UK BV, a division of the former Russian petroleum company Yukos, from 2002 to 2005. and a member of the board of Abbott Laboratories, a US healthcare company, from 1996-2011.

Khordorkovsky promoted social programs through Yukos in regions where the company operated.

In April 2003, Khodorkovsky announced that Yukos would merge with Sibneft, creating an oil company with reserves equal to those of Western petroleum multinationals.

Subsequent to Khodorkovsky's arrest, Leonid Nevzlin gained a controlling stake in Yukos when Khodorkovsky handed him a 60 % share in the holding company that controlled the firm.

I do not intend to comment on the ins and outs of this case which saw Yukos, a privately owned oil company, made bankrupt and broken up for the benefit of the state owned company Rosneft.

OJSC " Yukos Oil Company " (, ) was a petroleum company in Russia which, until 2003, was controlled by Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky and a number of other prominent Russian businessmen.

The Russian government accused the company of misusing tax havens inside Russia in the 1990s so as to reduce its tax burden ; havens were set up by most major oil producers in outlying areas of Russia which had been granted special tax status to assist in their economic development ; such " onshore-offshore " were used to evade profit taxes, resulting in Yukos having an effective tax rate of 11 %, vs a statutory rate of 30 % at the time.

Yukos claims its actions were legal at the time and that the company used the same tax optimisation schemes as other Russian oil companies, such as Lukoil, TNK-BP and Sibneft.

On 25 July 2006, the creditors of Yukos decided to file for bankruptcy after the bankruptcy manager stated that the company should be liquidated.

The claim is an estimate of what the value of Yukos would have been if its assets had not been stripped away and the company had not been liquidated in 2007.

The ECHR ruling became final on 8 March 2012 when the ECHR Grand Chamber did not accept the request of the Yukos Oil company to have its application to the court referred to the Grand Chamber.

-OAO NK Yukos company profile

In January 1998 it was announced that Sibneft would merge with Mikhail Khodorkovsky's Yukos to create the third-largest oil company in the world.

* Ongoing representation of shareholders of Yukos Oil Company in arbitration proceedings against the Russian Federation stemming from the bankruptcy and subsequent nationalization of the Yukos company.

During May 2006, the company announced its largest investment ever when it took over a majority share of Lithuania's Mažeikių Nafta, the largest company in the Baltic States, from Yukos.

It is best known as the company that won the December 19, 2004 auction for a 76. 79 % share in Yuganskneftegaz, formerly the core production subsidiary of Yukos Oil Company.

Requests by Yukos to defer payment, allow payment by instalments or to discharge the debt by sale of peripheral assets, including its shareholding in the Sibneft oil company, were also refused.

It was formerly the most important production subsidiary of Yukos, but was expropriated by the Russian government and given to Rosneft, a state-owned company.

It is alleged that the CEO of Bank Menatep and large shareholder in Yukos Platon Lebedev assisted Khodorkovsky.

In 1996 the majority of Yukos shares ( 90 %) were bought by Group Menatep in a series of auctions.

In 1998, when Bank Menatep became the holding company for Yukos oil, Pichugin was appointed as head of a section within Yukos's security department.

Kostina was a one-time adviser to Mikhail Khodorkovsky ( founder of Bank Menatep and the major Yukos stakeholder ) who had since become head of the Moscow mayor ’ s office's public relations department.

In April 1996 he became Vice President of Yukos at the time owned by Menatep.

In April 1998 Nevzlin became the First Vice Chairman of Menatep board and in 1999 after the Bank Menatep's bankruptcy amidst the 1998 Russian financial crisis he became the First Vice Chairman of Yukos board.

Illarionov was openly critical to such elements of the Russian economic policy as the Yukos affair, increasing influence of government officials on large companies such as Gazprom and Rosneft, and at last the Russia-Ukraine gas dispute and the energy policy of Russia in general.

: " Intimidating action by different law-enforcement agencies against Yukos and its business partners and other institutions linked to Mr Khodorkovsky and his associates and the careful preparation of this action in terms of public relations, taken together, give a picture of a co-ordinated attack by the state.

Simon Kukes, who became the CEO of Yukos, was already an experienced oil executive.

* Vladimir Petukhov, mayor of Nefteyugansk ( who had insisted that Yukos pay local taxes in full ) and

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, he accumulated wealth through the development of Siberian oil fields as the head of Yukos, one of the largest Russian companies to emerge from the privatization of state assets during the 1990s.

* Matteo M. Winkler, Arbitration without Privity and the Russian Oil: The Yukos Case before the Houston Court, already pub ' ed in 27 U. PA. J. INT ’ L ECON.

Nevzlin was a high ranking executive at Yukos, once a Russian oil firm before it was extinguished by the Russian government.

In 2003, following a tax reassessment, the Russian government presented Yukos with a series of tax claims that amounted to US $ 27 billion.

On 15 June 2006, based on a bank deposit of US $ 4 million and its American CEO's Houston home, Yukos filed for bankruptcy protection in the United States, estimating its assets at US $ 12. 3 billion and its debts at US $ 30. 8 billion, including " alleged taxes owed to the Russian government ".

After several weeks of deliberation, the Houston court declared that under no conceivable theory could Yukos assert domicile in the US.

In 2005, the number of billionaires dropped to 30, mostly because of the Yukos case, with Khodorkovsky dropping from # 1 ( US $ 15. 2 billion ) to # 21 ( US $ 2. 0 billion ).

On April 14, 2004, Yukos was presented with a bill for over US $ 35 bn in back taxes and a demand to pay the entire bill the same day.

( based in Vienna ), had filed a number of lawsuits against Yukos, claiming that they return US $ 100 million that his company had invested for the development of the Zapodno-Poludennoye and Krapivinskoye oil fields.

On 29 November 2004, The Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly ( PACE ) Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights published a report which concluded " the Assembly considers that the circumstances of the arrest and prosecution of leading Yukos executives suggest that the interest of the State's action in these cases goes beyond the mere pursuit of criminal justice, to include such elements as to weaken an outspoken political opponent, to intimidate other wealthy individuals and to regain control of strategic economic assets.

In June 2009 the Council of Europe published a report which criticized the Russian government's handling of the Yukos case, entitled " Allegations of Politically Motivated Abuses of the Criminal Justice System in Council of Europe Member States "

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe has condemned Russia's campaign against Yukos and its owners as manufactured for political reasons and a violation of human rights.

The government under Vladimir Putin then froze shares of Yukos shortly thereafter on tax charges.

The state took further actions against Yukos, leading to a collapse of the company's share price and the evaporation of much of Khodorkovsky's wealth.

In 1995 he acquired Yukos, which had debts exceeding $ 3. 5 billion, for $ 300 million.

Khodorkovsky had been reported to be negotiating with ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco about them taking a large stake in Yukos.

In early July 2003, Platon Lebedev, a Khodorkovsky partner and second largest shareholder in Yukos, was arrested on suspicion of illegally acquiring a stake in a state-owned fertilizer firm, Apatit, in 1994.

The arrest was followed by investigations into taxation returns filed by Yukos, and a delay to the antitrust commission's approval for its merger with Sibneft.

According to the sentence in the second trial, the companies that extracted oil ( such as Yuganskneftegaz and Tomskneft, in which Yukos held major stake, but did not have 100 % ownership ), would sell all their oil to different shell companies below market rates, and the shell companies would re-sell it to the eventual buyer at market rates.

Those shell companies had very few employees, conducted no other activity than reselling the oil, and some of them had offices in office buildings owned by Yukos.

Initially news of Khodorkovsky's arrest had a significant effect on the share price of Yukos.

Yukos moved quickly to replace Khodorkovsky with Russian born U. S. citizen Simon Kukes.

The U. S. State Department said the arrest " raised a number of concerns over the arbitrary use of the judicial system " and was likely to be very damaging to foreign investment in Russia, as it appeared there were " selective " prosecutions occurring against Yukos officials but not against others.