Dutch Court Gives Putin Partial Victory In Yukos Oil Case

Russia has won a partial victory in its years-long billion-dollar dispute with former shareholders of the now broken-up oil company Yukos, according to a ruling by the Supreme Court in The Hague, Annette Birschel reported for Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa).

Photo Insert: Yukos was once considered the largest oil company in Russia.

On Friday, the High Council of the Netherlands, as the Supreme Court is officially known, overturned a ruling by the court of appeal and referred the case back to the court on one point. This means there is still no decision on the payment of more than $50 billion in damages in the legal dispute, which has already lasted for seven years.

In 2014, an international arbitration court in The Hague awarded the former shareholders $50 billion in damages because Yukos had been unjustly expropriated. Two years later, the district court in The Hague overturned the claim after Russia filed a lawsuit.

The former shareholders appealed the decision and this was upheld. Moscow then appealed to the High Council. The judges have now upheld Moscow's case on one point. The court of appeal had wrongly dismissed Russia's objection that the shareholders had committed fraud in the arbitration proceedings on procedural grounds.

The court now has to rule on the substance of this in a new trial. Yukos was owned by former oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a harsh critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Russia declared the company insolvent in 2006 because Khodorkovsky had allegedly failed to pay billions of euros in taxes. Khodorkovsky had been in prison for 10 years until his release in 2013.

The arbitration court had found that the aim had been to "eliminate Khodorkovsky as a potential rival of President Putin and to appropriate Yukos' property."

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