RusEnergy

12 March 2007 - Upstream OnLine - Yukos creditors may announce more auctions to sell assets of bankrupt Russian oil giant Yukos as early as this week, the office of Yukos receiver Eduard Rebgun said today. "Yukos's creditors' committee discussed the composition of lots for other auctions at a meeting today. The results will be published in the official media shortly," Nikolai Lashkevich, Rebgun's spokesman told Reuters. "Presumably it could be on Saturday, when (Russian government gazette) Rossiiskaya Gazeta has a bankruptcy section, but it also may be published any other day this week," he said. The committee, led by tax officials and state-controlled oil company Rosneft, earlier announced the first two auctions to sell off the assets of Yukos, once Russia's largest oil company, to recover more than $26 billion in back taxes. The first auction on 27 March will dispose of Yukos's 9.4% stake in Rosneft, which already owns the bankrupt company's former main production unit, Yugansk. The state-controlled company is widely expected to buy the stake. Yukos's other equity asset, a 20% stake in Gazpromneft, the oil arm of gas monopoly Gazprom, will go under the hammer on 4 April, together with Yukos's northern gas production unit ArcticGaz and 20 other assets. The remainder of Yukos includes five major refineries and over 400,000 barrels per day of oil production. Gazprom and Rosneft are seen as the likely buyers of those assets as well. Yukos's receiver has valued the company's assets at $25.6 billion to 26.8 billion and said most would be sold by August 2007. Yukos's owners have called the auction a farce and said tax claims against the company were part of the Kremlin's revenge for the political ambitions of its main owner Mikhail Khodorkovsky, now serving an eight-year jail term in Siberia for fraud and tax evasion.