"On August 31, 2004, the Basmanny district court of Moscow acceded to your request that the bank accounts of Yukos' main production units should be placed under arrest. The company totally disagrees with the ruling, and considers it to be groundless," Yukos officials say in their letter. "We would like you to consider this message as an official request that Yukos subsidiaries' accounts be released from arrest."
With their existing accounts currently under arrest, Yukos subsidiaries will now have to open new accounts, which, according to the letter, will be used solely to maintain production and to pay current taxes and wages.
"Details such as the account numbers and the names of the banks will be reported to the Federal Tax Service and the Economic Development & Trade Ministry. Please note that money to those accounts will be coming from the sale of subsidiaries' products under contracts concluded directly with consumers," the letter reads. "We also deem it necessary to warn you that the arrest of the Yukos subsidiaries' new accounts may have serious economic, social and environmental implications," it adds.
In a statement issued on September 2, Yukos officials noted that the Basmanny court's August 31 order to lay claim to 76 billion roubles ($2.6 billion) on bank accounts belonging to the oil group's main production units had led to a complete blocking of the accounts of its subsidiary companies and made it impossible for them to carry out any transactions.
That ruling upheld the request from the Prosecutor General's Office for the freeze of the subsidiaries' accounts as well as the parent company's. According to Yukos' statement, that request was filed in as part of the new legal procedures instituted by Mr Tyutyunnik on August 30.
The Prosecutor General's Office has charged Irina Golub, Director General of the accounting group Yukos-FBTs, with masterminding a scheme for Yukos subsidiaries to evade the $2.6 billion in tax payments.
