RusEnergy

MOSCOW, May 11 (RIA Novosti) - An obscure company, Prana, has bought the office and research assets in an auction of now bankrupt oil giant Yukos [RTS: YUKO] for 100.091 billion rubles ($3.87 billion), a RIA Novosti correspondent said Friday. Prana, whose beneficiaries are unknown, made a bid that exceeded the starting price by almost five times outstripping its only rival in the auction, Neft-Aktiv, a subsidiary of state-controlled Rosneft, which has already snapped up the bulk of Yukos assets in previous auctions. "We did not expect the price to jump so high and competition to be so fierce," said Nikolai Lashkevich, press secretary for the Yukos bankruptcy receiver. The initial lot price, that included the former 22-story Yukos central office in Moscow, was 22 billion rubles (about $855 million), with a bid increment of 110.36 million rubles (about $4.3 million). Yukos was declared bankrupt August 1, 2006, after three years of litigation with tax authorities over the company's tax arrears. Yukos, whose founder Mikhail Khodorkovsky is serving an eight-year prison term in Siberia, faces a total of more than 700 billion rubles (about $26.9 billion) in claims from creditors. Khodorkovsky, arrested in 2003 and found guilty of fraud and tax evasion in May 2005, financed opposition forces in Russia and was believed to nurture political ambitions. Once one of the richest people in Russia, Khodorkovsky said his persecution was orchestrated as punishment for such ambitions and as part of a campaign to bring the mineral sector under Kremlin control. In 2004, Rosneft bought a little known company three days after it won an auction to buy Yukos' main production asset, Yuganskneftegaz.