Mystery buyer sells Yukos's unit to state firm

A Russian state oil firm has bought Yukos's core unit, effectively nationalising 11% of the country's crude output and dealing a heavy blow to Yukos's attempts to halt its own dismemberment.

A Rosneft official said his firm had bought 100% of Baikal Finance Group, the shock winner of Sunday's auction of core Yukos unit Yuganskneftegaz. 'I can confirm we have bought it all,' he said. But he gave no sum for the deal.

The Yugansk auction was the culmination of a Kremlin campaign to crush Yukos's politically ambitious principal owner, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and seize control of strategic sectors of the economy sold off in the chaotic privatisations of the 1990s.

The Rosneft purchase has now underscored the Kremlin's determination to prevail and claim Yukos's prize asset for itself. Rosneft is due to be merged with state gas monopoly Gazprom, which was itself the favourite to buy Yugansk at the auction but was barred by a Houston court considering Yukos's petition for bankruptcy under $27.5 billion in back-tax bills.

The auction was won by Baikal, a previously unknown firm that cast a winning bid of $9.4 billion.

Yukos lawyers have argued that Gazprom had illegally taken part in the weekend sale of Yugansk, even though it did not lodge a bid, and that it was therefore in contempt of the Houston court's restraining order.

Analysts said the Rosneft purchase of Yugansk's new owner, Baikal, meant that the company was now in state hands and possibly out of reach of litigation by lawyers acting for Yukos and Menatep, the company controlling the stricken oil firm.

'The Russian government has sovereign immunity. You cannot sue the Russian government,' an investment strategic at Moscow-based brokerage Soblink Securities said. 'They were forced into this by the actions of Menatep in the Texas courts and the threat of further actions of the same type which could have led to the seizure of Gazprom assets,' he added.

Gazprom is believed to have spent the last few days since Sunday's auction consulting international corporate lawyers in order to find a way out of their legal quandary.

Yukos filed for bankruptcy protection in Houston in a last-ditch move to save Russia's largest oil producer. But yesterday an attorney for Deutsche Bank, which was a member of a banking syndicate backing Gazprom, told the Houston court the bank would seek to have Yukos's Chapter 11 bankruptcy claim thrown out because the court has no jurisdiction over a Russian company.

The next hearing in the bankruptcy court was scheduled for January 6. Yukos has based its claim on US jurisdiction on a Houston office established earlier this month and two Texas bank accounts containing a total of $7 million.