Last Yukos auction held amid mystery and controversy

MOSCOW (AFP) - The final auction to sell off assets belonging to bankrupt Russian oil group Yukos was held in Moscow yesterday, with the identity of the buyers and legal wrangling adding a sense of mystery to proceedings.

Yukos, once Russia's biggest oil group, has been declared backrupt and its assets are being auctioned off to settle multi-billion-dollar back tax claims filed by the Russian government.

The auction yesterday was the last of a series of sales, the company's liquidator confirmed, with Russian state-controlled oil group Rosneft again the main protaganist.

But as well as confusion about who had won the bidding, there was also doubt about whether the auction was valid.

The main asset for sale -- Yukos Finance, which owned Yukos's foreign assets including a stake in a Slovakian pipeline group -- is a Netherlands-based company and lawyers for Yukos claimed the Russian liquidator had no legal right to sell it.

Yukos Finance was bought by a Russian-registered group called Promneftstroy, initially believed to be acting on behalf of Rosneft, which bid 224 million euros (302 million dollars).

It later emerged that Rosneft had sold Promneftstroy to a mysterious group called Monte Valle shortly before the auction, according to reports by Russian news agencies.

Rosneft was without doubt the buyer of the second lot of the auction -- a series of debts owing to the company -- and paid 332 million euros.

Yukos was declared bankrupt with debts of 27.5 billion dollars (20 billion euros) after a government tax fraud onslaught that was seen as politically motivated.

The owner of Yukos, former chief executive Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was handed an eight-year prison sentence that was widely seen as punishment for the tycoon's defiance of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Putin has made returning Russian energy assets to state hands a key part of his presidency, with the country's hydrocarbons a key tool in the country's foreign policy.

Yesterday transactions were the last sales in a campaign that began with a series of fraud inquiries into Yukos in 2003 and ended with the company's bankruptcy last year.