"Viktor Khristenko has not received any documents from any lawyers representing anyone's interests," Stanislav Naumov said, commenting on media reports that U.S. shareholders of the embattled Russian oil giant had filed a lawsuit in Washington Monday against the Russian government and Russian companies, and that Khristenko had been summoned to the Court of the District of Columbia.
"We do not know anything about claims by Western shareholders against Viktor Khristenko... We are consulting with the Russian Embassy in the U.S. to correctly assess the legal situation," he said.
"The delegation's work is continuing as planned," he said.
Nikolai Krylov, a lawyer for Russia's state-owned natural gas monopoly Gazprom, which is also being targeted by U.S. shareholders over the Yukos affair, said that the shareholders should file a lawsuit against the Yukos management.
"U.S. shareholders in Yukos should have independently assessed the potential risks when buying shares in this company. If they consider themselves deprived of their rights, then following international practice in examining similar cases and common sense, they should first of all file charges not against the government of a sovereign state, or against oil and gas companies and their employees who bear no relation to the operations of Yukos, but to the management of Yukos, which for many years misled shareholders and did not pay taxes," Gazprom's lawyer said.
The Yukos situation is "merely a consequence of the actions of the company and its management and insufficient control by the board of directors, who were elected by private shareholders."
