Hearing postponed on Yukos complaint against Rusia

The hearing has been postponed to allow a recently appointed ad hoc judge on the case more time to familiarise himself with the file.

A European Court of Human Rights hearing on November 19 of a 98-billion-dollar complaint against Russia by former oil giant Yukos has been postponed to allow a judge time to study the case, the court said Tuesday.

- The hearing has been postponed to allow a recently appointed ad hoc judge on the case (Andrei Bushev) more time to familiarise himself with the file - the court said in statement.

There was no mention of when the hearing might now take place.

The court announced in August that a Russian judge on the panel, Valery Mussin, had resigned after having been named a director at Russian gas giant Gazprom in order to avoid a conflict of interest in the Yukos matter.

Russian President Dimitry Medvedev then named another judge, Andrei Bushev, as a replacement.

Yukos contends that Russian tax authorities engineered the company's bankruptcy by handing out disproportionately high fines for financial irregularities.

It said in its court filing there had been a "lack of proper legal basis" for doing so as well as a "selective and arbitrary prosecution" of its business.

Russian judges found the company guilty of tax fraud on several occasions between 2000 and 2003, with Yukos handing over some 13 billion euros in unpaid taxes and six billion euros in penalty charges.

A former state operator, Yukos was privatised in the mid 1990s. It declared bankruptcy in 2006 before being wound up in 2007.

Its founding chief executive, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was convicted and sentenced to eight years in prison in 2005 for major fraud and tax evasion.

He has been on trial again before a Moscow court since March 3 and faces more than 20 years in prison over embezzlement allegations.

Supporters of Khodorkovsky, once Russia's richest man, have condemned the trial as politically motivated and aimed at keeping the 45-year-old critic of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin out of the political scene indefinitely.