Khodorkovsky associate downplays $100-bn Russia suit
AFP
By Dmitry Zaks January 11, 2014
Former Russian oil tycoon and Kremlin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky leaves after a press conference at the Wall Museum at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin on December 22, 2013 (AFP Photo/David Gannon)
Moscow (AFP) - A close business partner of ex-tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky said Saturday that the Kremlin critic appears to no longer be interested in a $100-billion lawsuit against Russia since his release from jail.
Khodorkovsky -- Russia's former richest man who last month won a pardoned from President Vladimir Putin after more than a decade behind bars -- was in Israel this week for a meeting with Leonid Nevzlin and three other co-owners of his now-defunct Yukos oil firm.
The hush-hush trip raised immediate speculation that the 50-year-old Putin rival was devising a strategy for an unprecedented $100-billion (73-billion-euro) damages suit that is tentatively set to be heard by an arbitration court in The Hague later this year.
Khodorkovsky's wealth was once valued by Forbes magazine at $15 billion based on his holding in what was then Russia's largest oil company.
Yukos was forced into bankruptcy and eventually dismantled by the Russian state in return for disputed back taxes comparable to the company's entire worth.
The former oligarch said in Germany days after his release that he no longer knew his precise wealth but estimated it in the millions of dollars.
But Nevzlin said on Saturday that Khodorkovsky was not planning to claw back his old Yukos holdings nor actively pursue the record-setting damages suit against the Russian government.
"We no longer have mutual business interests," Nevzlin told the online edition of the Kommersant business daily from Israel.
"We are meeting exclusively as friends and are spending most of our time at the dinner table," he added.
'The case is over'
Both Western and Russian supporters of Khodorkovsky believe the tycoon was first jailed for funding opposition movements to ex-spy Putin's increasingly dominant and authoritarian rule.
Yukos also openly fought Kremlin interests and became a Western investment darling by being the first to adopt US accounting standards -- a radical break from the opaque financial and ownership structures dominating the post-Soviet landscape.
Khodorkovsky transferred almost the entire stake he held in Yukos through a Gibraltar-registered holding company called Group Menatep -- now known as GML -- to Nevzlin shortly after his 2003 arrest.
The move was meant to protect Yukos from the government's case against the company's owner. But the state still managed to topple the firm by demanding $27 billion in back taxes and threatening even further claims.
The damages suit by GML against the Russian government argues that Putin's team used false pretences to devalue the oil company and ruin its shareholders.
Nevzlin is positioned at the heart of GML's case -- a lawsuit that some Western analysts believe could set a precedent with very painful economic consequences for Putin's 14-year rule.
But Khodorkovsky's trusted business partner appeared to be distancing both himself and his former boss from the case on Saturday.
"We never discussed a thing about it (in Israel). And there is nothing to discuss -- the case is over," Nevzlin stressed.
Khodorkovsky had earlier said that his appeal for clemency from Putin included a promise to stay out of Russian politics and not seek his old Yukos stakes.
He has instead vowed to devote himself to the release of Russia's "political prisoners" while avoiding his homeland for as long as a court order for him to pay $550 million in damages remained in place.
