THE HAGUE, August 20 (RIA Novosti, Andrei Poskakukhin) - The Amsterdam Court will pronounce a ruling on the lawsuit of a consortium of ten western banks against the Yukos oil company on September 29, the consortium's lawyer said.The western banks filed the lawsuit Friday requesting the court to check the legitimacy of the transfer of shares of Yukos subsidiaries. A spokesman for the ING bank (the Netherlands), a member of the consortium, said that the bank granted a $1 billion loan to Yukos Oil in September 2003. Yukos Oil has not repaid $473 million of this debt and interest, he said. The banks were seeking the sell of shares of the Yukos Finance joint stock company registered in the Netherlands. This company manages Yukos foreign property (an oil refinery in Lithuania and a pipeline in Slovakia) worth $1 billion. However, in April 2005, Yukos Finance set up the Yukos B.V. company without informing the consortium to transfer shares of the above-mentioned subsidiaries.
Yukos said that it was done to protect interests of creditors because Russian authorities could have alienate the shares to settle Yukos's tax debt.
The consortium disagrees with this statement because Yukos Finance became a dummy company and the shares of Yukos subsidiaries are beyond the reach of creditors, the ING spokesman said.
