Yukos in The Netherlands - Yukos Finance BV, Yukos Capital SARL & Yukos International

With Yukos Oil Company in Russia destroyed and its assets expropriated by the Russian authorities attention turned to Yukos assets held outside of Russia. As has been discussed above, the most significant of these assets was the Mazeikiu Nafta oil refinery in Lithuania, which was sold for US$1.492 billion and the proceeds placed in a bank account in the Netherlands, in the name of Yukos International.

Beneficial ownership of Yukos International – and so the Mazeikiu proceeds and other Yukos assets – ultimately resides with Yukos Finance, a Dutch subsidiary of Yukos based in Amsterdam. (See section 2 for a discussion of Yukos’ company structure).

Accordingly, the Yukos cases taking place in the Netherlands aim to get control of Yukos Finance and/or its assets. The most important of these cases concerns:

• Exercise of shareholders rights pertaining to Yukos Finance (the ’31 October Judgment’); and
• Yukos creditors accessing the shares of Yukos Finance (the ‘474G cases’).

In addition to this, the Luxembourg-based Yukos Capital SARL (a wholly owned subsidiary of the Netherlands-based Yukos International) has been involved in proceedings in the Dutch courts, relating to the enforcement of four arbitral awards found against Rosneft:

• Yukos Capital SARL enforcement proceedings against Rosneft (the ‘Yukos Capital case’).

These three areas are detailed below.