| Investigators looked into Yukos again After almost a six-month break, excavations have resumed at YUKOS. Yesterday, employees of the Main Directorate for Tax Crimes (GUNP) of the Ministry of Internal Affairs visited the company’s central office on Dubininskaya Street and took away several boxes of documents. After this, the police went to the building in Ulansky Lane, which was previously occupied by YUKOS, and now houses the MFO MENATEP. According to employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, investigative actions are being carried out as part of criminal cases of tax evasion by YUKOS subsidiaries - Samaraneftegaz and Tomskneft.
According to YUKOS, yesterday morning “several dozen representatives of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, presenting a resolution to seize documents, went to the company’s office.” It is worth noting that investigators have not been seen at the Yukos office for a long time. Their previous visit to the central building of the holding took place in November last year. Then investigators from the Prosecutor General's Office seized documents from the secretariat of the head of YUKOS-Moscow (the holding's management company) Stephen Theede as part of the investigation into the main YUKOS case - fraud and tax evasion. Prior to this, throughout the fall, investigators regularly seized documents and computer servers in the building on Dubininskaya, the office of the MFO MENATEP, the Koralovo orphanage, and in the houses of the company’s shareholders. Then the Prosecutor General's Office accused Yukos of tax evasion of “tens of billions of rubles.” True, if previously YUKOS lawyers announced numerous violations committed by investigators, now the seizures took place without a scandal and ended quickly. After lunch, it was announced that the investigators had left the building on Dubininskaya, noting in the protocol that “the company provided almost all the documents requested by the investigators.”
This time the police were interested in the activities of large mining companies of YUKOS - Tomskneft and Samaraneftegaz. As employees of the central office of the Ministry of Internal Affairs who participated in yesterday's seizures explained to the Vremya Novostey newspaper, over the past six months they have received a lot of requests from the regions demanding that they seize documents from YUKOS in criminal cases of tax evasion. First of all, we are talking about the situation with Samaraneftegaz, Kuibyshevsky, Novokuibyshevsky and Syzran oil refineries. Last fall, the prosecutor's office of the Samara region inspected all these enterprises and identified financial irregularities in them, primarily related to schemes for the so-called tax minimization. According to investigators, petroleum products were sold through companies controlled by YUKOS and registered offshore, which made it possible to significantly reduce tax payments to the state. Also, part of the oil sold was designated in the documents as “oil well fluid,” which is subject to much lower taxes. As a result, a case was opened against the director of the Syzran Oil Refinery, Nikolai Lyadin (he was accused of non-payment of excise taxes on petroleum products), and the head of the Kuibyshev Oil Refinery, Rafail Zainullin, was arrested. The investigation of the latest case was entrusted to the Main Investigation Department of the Internal Affairs Directorate of the Samara Region, which closed it in February 2004. The prosecutor's office did not agree with this decision and resumed the investigation in March. Zainullin's lawyers challenged this decision in one of the Samara district courts, which declared the actions of the prosecutor's office illegal. However, last Wednesday the prosecutor's office filed a protest against this verdict to the Samara Regional Court. While the legal battles were ongoing, a new criminal case was opened on tax fraud, this time against the management of Samaraneftegaz.
At the same time, at the end of 2003, the Tomsk Regional Prosecutor's Office became interested in the activities of another "daughter" of YUKOS - OJSC Tomskneft-VNK. As the investigation suspected, back in 1999, the company bought a bill of exchange from MENATEP Bank from YUKOS with a face value of 1 billion rubles, and then presented it for payment, asking that the specified amount be credited to the account of Tomskneft-VNK as funds intended to pay taxes in budget. However, at that time, MENATEP was already in a state of bankruptcy, and right on the day of payments with Tomskneft-VNK, its license was revoked. After that, according to the papers, it turned out that Tomskneft-VNK had paid all its debts to the state, but in reality the money did not go to the budget. You can no longer demand anything from a bankrupt bank. A criminal case was opened on this fact.
The Samara and Tomsk regional prosecutor's offices have repeatedly sent papers to the Ministry of Internal Affairs with a request to seize the documents they need for the investigation from YUKOS. However, the police decided not to go to the oil company to get each piece of paper separately. When there were quite a lot of requests, GUNP employees carried out a large-scale seizure of documents at YUKOS and took everything they needed at one time.
“In accordance with the Tax Code, the obligation to pay tax is considered fulfilled by the taxpayer from the moment the order to pay the tax is presented to the bank,” Yukos told us yesterday. -- Tomskneft fulfilled its tax payment obligations. Despite the fact that the MENATEP bank, through which payments were made, was unable to transfer the money received from the taxpayer to the budget due to the systemic default of the Russian economy, all funds were subsequently fully transferred by the bank to the state upon its liquidation or repaid in another way, completely excluding presentation any tax requirements. Indeed, the prosecutor's office of the Samara region opened a criminal case against Samaraneftegaz OJSC. As justification for the actions of the prosecutor's office, a reference is made to allegedly fictitious agreements on the sale of oil well fluid to Samaraneftegaz OJSC, which, according to the prosecutor's office, resulted in an understatement of tax payments in the amount of 3.2 billion rubles. Samaraneftegaz and NK Yukos, when concluding and executing oil purchase and sale agreements, paid all necessary tax payments in full, while all oil purchase and sale transactions were actually executed by the parties. As part of the regular tax audits of OJSC Samaraneftegaz, no discrepancies were identified between the data of OJSC Samaraneftegaz on oil sales indicated in tax calculations and reflected in the accounting and reporting of actual sales of mineral raw materials. For the reasons stated above, we completely deny any possibility of the presence of elements of such a crime as tax evasion or any other violations of the law.” Alexander SHVAREV, Denis REBROV |
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