There were times when the Supreme Court of Switzerland had cared about law and justice. Suspicious $5 billions. The website Prigovor.ru reminds its readers of what happened on June 3, 2004.
On this day, on June 3, 2004, the Supreme Court of Switzerland dismissed a complaint of three unnamed companies on defreezing bank accounts belonging to shareholders of the JSC Oil Company NK Yukos. A large sum of money, about 5 billion dollars, belonging to a couple of dozens of Russians, including shareholders of Yukos and “Menatep”, had been frozen the mid-March 2004 after prosecution actions in several offices in Zurich and Geneva, in the cantons Fribourg and Schwyz in the central part of the country. The money had been frozen frozen in the following banks – Banque Indosuez (Geneva), Dresdner Bank (Switzerland) SA (Geneva), CBG Compagnie Bancaire Geneve (Geneva), and UBS AG (Zurich).
And at this time, Mikhail Khodorkovsky* in every possible way denied that he had bank accounts outside Russia.
(See also the article “On this day, Mikhail Khodorkovsky insolently lied to the Moscow City Court”).
Khodorkovsky in May 2004 assured the Moscow City Court that he had no bank accounts in Switzerland or in other countries. However, on the same day, in the same Moscow City Court, Yukos lawyers tried to challenge the arrest of the Swiss accounts, belonging to the defendants of the Yukos case, with Khodorkovsky among them.
DECISION BASED ON POLITICAL GROUNDS
Later, the swindlers decided to “outmuscle” the Supreme Court of Switzerland – they inundated judges with complaints from certain companies and private persons insisting that bank accounts of the shareholders of the JSC NK Yukos could not be frozen, as indictments against Khodorkovsky and other persons, were “politically motivated”.
These false grounds became a loophole sui generis for the Supreme Court of Switzerland – the money was gradually unblocked, and then the bank started to believe in the fairy tales about “politics” in the case of the finance wheeler-dealers, and stopped legal cooperation with Moscow.
The Supreme Court of Switzerland held the ruling – “Switzerland should not hand over to Russia the bank documents pertaining to the so-called Yukos affair”. The court referred also to the completely politicized resolution of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe “on Yukos case”.
Later, naturally, everything was exposed. The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) rejected the complaint of the former top-managers of Yukos company Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev with regards to the part of it which said that the criminal case against them had been politically motivated, and, by the way, it did it twice, thus destroying the myth about “political character” of the criminal prosecution of swindlers and murderers from Yukos and “Menatep”.
MONEY WAS HIDDEN BOTH FROM TAXES AND SHAREHOLDERS
In 2014, the media outlet “Business Swiss”, describing Khodorkovsky’s Swiss schemes, analyzed some machinations of Khodorkovsky with apatite concentrate and oil. It pointed out that that all these gray schemes were only “tax optimization”. Yet, this media outlet overlooked that the tricksters from Yukos had used Switzerland not only as a financial center with “comfortable taxes”, but also as a “dump” – the price difference, received from resell of apatite concentrate, Khodorkovsky and Lebedev were hiding not only from Russian Tax Service, but also from shareholders of the JSC “Apatit”, thus inflicting damage both to the shareholders and the company.
“By the way, this is still a favorite theme of the foreign agent and financial swindler Khodorkovsky. “How could one steal oil from himself”, dramatically asks he emphasizing his indignation. But that’s the point – not “from himself”, but from a large number of the company’s shareholders", notes the website Prigovor.ru.
(See also the previous article “On this day, Yukos was caught in an effort to bribe British police”. The private intelligence network “ISC Global”, created by Stephen Curtis with the money of fugitive oligarchs, got into a jam connected with corruption scandal. The website Prigovor.ru reminds its readers of what happened on June 2, 2006).
*On May 20, 2022, the Russian Ministry of Justice, included M.B. Khodorkovsky in the list of physical persons executing functions of a foreign agent.
