The seizure of Yukos, a defunct oil company, was a turning point in Vladimir Putin's consolidation of power
RARELY ARE the stakes of a single word in a legal dispute so great as in the case of the shareholders of Yukos, a defunct Russian oil company. On February 18th a Dutch appeals court will rule on whether the Russian state must compensate shareholders for bankrupting Yukos using bogus tax-fraud charges. In 2014 the Permanent Court of Arbitration , an international dispute-resolution court in The Hague, awarded them $50bn—one of the largest awards ever.
But the biggest arbitration case was the one at the PCA in The Hague. It was launched by a holding company called GML, comprising Mr Nevzlin and a few other big shareholders who together had controlled 60% of Yukos. They claimed that Russia’s seizure of the company had violated the Energy Charter Treaty, an international investor-protection agreement. That treaty lets foreign investors file for arbitration at several venues, including the PCA, in case of a dispute.
Whatever the appeals court decides, the loser will almost certainly appeal to the Netherlands’ Supreme Court, which could take another year or more. If GML ultimately wins, its lawyers would still have to recover the money. Their efforts to do so in 2015, after the initial PCA ruling, did not go well. In Belgium, GML tried to attach Russian embassy bank accounts and government-owned buildings, but the accounts were unfrozen because of diplomatic immunity.
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