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Share Name | Share Symbol | Market | Type |
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Dominion Energy Inc | NYSE:D | NYSE | Common Stock |
Price Change | % Change | Share Price | High Price | Low Price | Open Price | Shares Traded | Last Trade | |
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-0.0001 | 0.00% | 51.3999 | 51.65 | 51.04 | 51.41 | 2,989,229 | 00:55:39 |
MOSCOW—Russia threatened retaliation against European state-controlled companies after Belgium and France froze some Russian assets as part of an effort to enforce a $50 billion arbitration judgment over the Kremlin's seizing of oil company Yukos.
Authorities in Belgium and France this week froze some assets connected with the Russian government, including real estate and bank accounts, at the behest of shareholders of Mikhail Khodorkovsky's now-defunct Yukos oil company, which was broken up and nationalized starting in 2003 by the Russian state. A decision by a court in The Hague last year said Russia unlawfully dismantled Yukos through excessive tax claims after Mr. Khodorkovsky fell out with the Kremlin and was arrested at gunpoint. Russia has disputed the judgment and says it won't comply.
A representative of former Yukos shareholders said they turned to individual governments to freeze Russian assets abroad after Russia made it clear it wouldn't pay compensation, and promised to take their fight against the Russian government to other countries, including Germany.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov called the freezing of assets "illegitimate," saying Russia would retaliate and that affected companies could turn to Russian courts for justice.
"(The companies) are going to appeal to the Russian courts with a request in response to these unlawful actions against them to undertake the same actions in Russia—the arrest of the property of the state-owned foreign companies," he said in an interview posted on the Foreign Ministry website Friday.
He said France had briefly frozen the accounts of Russia's embassy, its Unesco representative office and trade mission, before lifting the freeze. He said the accounts of some Russian state-owned companies were still frozen.
A spokeswoman for the Belgian Foreign Ministry declined to comment. The French Justice Ministry didn't respond to a request for comment.
GML Ltd., the Gibraltar-registered vehicle through which Mr. Khodorkovsky and his colleagues held their controlling stake, however, said it had already appealed to the U.S. and the United Kingdom to take similar steps. He also said GML would likely turn to Germany as well.
"We continue to investigate assets... I think over the next number of years, you can expect to see us rolling this out in new countries," said Tim Osborne, director of GML.
"We will be starting in Germany pretty shortly. After that Europe is very attractive because you can reply on the rule of law applying and it's pretty clear there are assets there."
The court case waged by GML was one of the most costly legal battles in arbitration history and delivered the largest arbitration award ever.
Mr. Khodorkovsky, whose Yukos produced more oil than some Gulf Arab states at the height of its production, said he became a target after he funded political opposition groups and criticized high-level corruption in Vladimir Putin's Russia.
Mr. Osborne said the New York Arbitration Convention laid the legal grounds for the asset freezes, while GML takes its case to district courts urging them to uphold the decision at a local level. Favorable local court decisions would ultimately allow them to seize the frozen real estate and liquidate the bank accounts, he said.
GML asked authorities in the U.S. and France late last year to look into the asset freezes and petitioned the United Kingdom earlier this year. It approached Belgium only this week.
Mr. Osborne said part of the legal proceedings included proving that the companies in question were not only majority state-owned companies but also acted as an agent of the state.
He declined to say whether he thought the group would try to recover the entire compensation sum through asset seizures, but said they would push forward.
"The actual amount for the moment doesn't really matter, whether it's $1 billion or $10 billion, it sure as hell ain't $50 billion so we can keep going."
Inti Landauro contributed to this article
Write to Thomas Grove at thomas.grove@wsj.com
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