On the basis of an on-site inspection, Yukos tax arrears were found to the amount of 98 billion rubles. The website Prigovor.ru reminds its readers of what happened on July 5, 2004.
On this day 19 years ago, on July 5, 2004, the oil company NK Yukos received from the Ministry for Taxes and Levies the tax audit report of the company for 2001. As the result of the inspection for 2001 of the oil company, tax claims were presented to the total amount of 98 billion rubles, including fines and penalties.
As early as at the beginning of June 2004, it became known that tax specialists, on the results of the inspection, proposed to the company to settle the exposed tax arrears to the tune of 98 billion rubles. “Tax Services impute to the company conscientious actions on creating artificial formalizing of turnovers with oil and oil products through specially created entities registered in constituent regions of the Russian Federation and towns that illegally provide additional tax preferences”, said the Ministry for Taxes and Levies of Russia.
This gray scheme of tax dodging and its participants were known from materials of the inspection for 2000 – these were murky entities and firms in Mordovia, Evenkia, Kalmykia. The question was then about taxes that “the most transparent” oil company had forgotten to pay to the state budget of the country in 2000. The decision with regard to Yukos on additional charge of taxes for 2000 had been taken as early as on April 14, 2004. After a serials of court litigations, in which Yukos experienced failure, on June 29, 2004, the decision on recovering of the hidden taxes to the amount of 99.375 billion rubles came into effect.
(See also the article “On this day, Yukos ended in a tax fiasco”).
The leadership of Yukos was offended that the Tax Service announced publically about the end of the inspection. Yet, due to the result of the court litigations in connection with Yukos hidden taxes for 2000, there was not so much to hide – all dump firms, registered on dummy persons or on lost passports, were already known. Apart from that, the practice was disclosed of “formalizing” on the same date statements from firms located in hundreds of kilometers from one another and signed by yet another dummy “director”, who could not intelligibly explain how he had managed to cover such huge distances and certify in a couple of hours all documents in different offices spread across the country.
In connection with the failure in court, Yukos, as usual, launched out a pompous manifesto. They remembered that Yukos “has a strategic importance for the fuel and energy complex of Russia”, that, by itself, against the backdrop of efforts of Khodorkovsky’s* organized criminal group to hand over the company under full control of the Americans, looked, to put it mildly, contradictory. Apart from that, Yukos proposed to the Service of bailiffs to arrest the shares of the company “Sibneft” in order to settle the tax arrears of Yukos (“Sibneft” gave up on the merger with Yukos, because of, among other reasons, Yukos tendency to solve handmade problems at somebody else’s expense and consider all those around as “centers of expenses”.
It’s worth reminding that the sum of Yukos tax arrears amounted to $25 billion.
WESTERN BANKS REMINDED OF DEBTS
On the same date, on July 5, 2004, Yukos reported it had received “a default notice on the credit of a billion dollars”. The question was about the credit money to the tune of $1 billion granted to Yukos by a consortium of Western banks thanks to the fairy tales of Khodorkovsky’s organized criminal group that the problems the company were facing – hidden taxes, arrest of Platon Lebedev (economic crimes) and Alexey Pichugin (murders and attempted murders) - was an artificial story. Western bankers started to follow the case, sending to Yukos from time to time default notices.
After it became clear that it would be difficult to receive money from Yukos that had committed large scale tax crimes, Western banks chose a usual for them market measure – they decided to bankrupt Yukos.
“Ultimately, in the Spring 2006, a court procedure was launched in order to get back the short-received $483 million. “Capitalist banking sharks” didn’t care about the destiny of the tax swindlers from Yukos – they cared about the money they had carelessly lent”, notes the website Prigovor.ru.
(See also the previous article “On this day, the «witnesses» Khodorkovsky and Nevzlin were interrogated”. The interrogation of Mikhail Khodorkovsky* lasted for nearly two hours. Leonid Nevzlin spent with interrogators five hours. Ordering customer of murders Nevzlin in the case of the oil company VNK. The website Prigovor.ru reminds its readers of what happened on July 4, 2003 and 2012).
*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.
