YUKOS WILL HAVE TO PAY 121.8 BILLION RUBLES

MOSCOW, February 21 (RIA Novosti) - The Moscow arbitration appellate court has refused to suspend the ruling of the interregional inspection of the Federal Tax Service (FNS) on big tax-payer Number 1 on writing off in indisputable penalty of 121.8 billion rubles (1 dollar equals 27.9 rubles) of the 2002 tax debt from the YUKOS accounts.

In this way, the court has dismissed the YUKOS appeal.

In all, the FNS November 16, 2004 ruling has added 193.8 billion rubles of taxes for 2002. Of them, 90.3 billion rubles (the main debt) and 31.5 billion rubles (penalty) were written off from the YUKOS accounts indisputably. The total of fines (72.04 billion rubles) were recovered according to the Tax Code of the Russian Federation.

YUKOS challenged the November 16 ruling and, within the appeal framework, moved for suspending the indisputable writing off.

On December 3, 2004 the Moscow Arbitration Court dismissed the appeal.

Then, YUKOS turned to the appeals instance. At today's hearings, a representative of oil company said that in passing the ruling the first-instance court violated several norms of the Arbitration Procedure Code of the Russian Federation, as well as articles 45 of the Russian Tax Code. However, the appellate instance has left the previous ruling unchanged.