One less problem

The Federal Tax Service withdrew one of eight claims against Russneft

RussNeft and its head Mikhail Gutseriev may have some hope of improving relations with the authorities . On Friday it became known that the Federal Tax Service abandoned one of eight claims filed against Russneft for illegal transactions in the purchase and sale of its shares. The Federal Tax Service explains: the recall is of a technical nature and is due to the fact that the company Yuran-Invest, accused in this case, sold shares of RussNeft back in July last year to the companies Mlada and Milanfo, which are subject to other claims by tax authorities. Russneft, however, hopes that a similar situation will be repeated with the remaining seven lawsuits.

The Federal Tax Service accuses RussNeft that its management deliberately dispersed shares among numerous shell companies, and then passed these packages through several long chains of purchase and sale by various shell companies. The share price under such schemes was nominal. This, according to inspectors, led to a reduction in the tax base and non-payment of appropriate taxes, and therefore to a violation of Article 169 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation on transactions contrary to morality and ethics. The accused are companies that are either former or current shareholders of Russneft: Initiative LLC, Shaddock Trading Limited LLC, IC AMI-Invest CJSC, Mlada CJSC, IC Yuran-Invest, OJSC IC Garant-Invest, OJSC IC Nadezhnost, CJSC IC Nordfest, CJSC Spectr, CJSC Ofar and CJSC Milanfo, as well as the registrar Service-Register. In addition, the Federal Agency for State Property Management and Sberbank as a nominal holder of a portion of the shares were involved in the proceedings as a third party. The tax authorities do not name the amount of the claims, but they demand, if the court finds that they are right, to transfer all the company’s shares to the state.

Tax authorities filed similar claims with the Moscow Arbitration Court back in April. But the court could not accept the case for consideration for a long time, as reported, due to irregularities in the preparation of documentation. And only on June 19, the Federal Tax Service managed to get the court to arrest the shares of Russneft as an interim measure. The first preliminary hearing took place at the end of June, but even then the case was postponed at the request of a representative of one of the shareholders of RussNeft, the investment company Reliability. He indicated that there were changes in the claim and asked the court for time to consider it.

On Friday, immediately after the meeting, a representative of Nadezhnost told reporters in court that the Federal Tax Service would be forced to withdraw other claims, since the demands of the tax authorities “contradict the current legislation and are not supported by the necessary evidence.” According to him, the shareholders of RussNeft have still not received a decision from the Federal Tax Service to hold the company accountable, which should record the facts of non-payment of taxes and causing losses to the budget. The transactions for the purchase and sale of shares themselves underwent an independent audit and were legal, including the payment of all taxes.

Such confidence from a shareholder, essentially a representative of the oil company itself (at one time, Mr. Gutseriev admitted that he personally owned about 70% of RussNeft shares, and the rest were divided among his relatives), is somewhat surprising. After all, since the fall of last year, the head of the company has been experiencing serious problems in relations with the state. In November, the Prosecutor General's Office opened several criminal cases against two subsidiaries of Russneft - Ulyanovskneft and Nafta Ulyanovsk. They were accused of exceeding the oil production limit in 2003-2004 and receiving 2.7 billion rubles as a result. illegal profits. At the beginning of this year, the Investigative Committee of the Ministry of Internal Affairs opened a criminal case into RussNeft’s failure to pay taxes on a particularly large scale. And in May, Mr. Gutseriev was formally charged and ordered not to leave. Currently, the Moscow Arbitration Court is hearing several cases regarding claims of the Federal Tax Service against Russneft totaling several tens of billions of rubles. One part of them is being disputed by Russneft itself, while the Federal Tax Service is suing for the other. And even if the Federal Tax Service has to abandon proceedings in the case of resale of shares, it will still have many trump cards.

Anna GORSHKOVA