On March 19, 2004, the court, at the request of the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Russian Federation, froze assets in the UBS AG bank (Zurich) in all accounts of the companies Apatit Fertilaizers S.A., Polifert AG Seestatt AG, Nord West AG, Behles Petroleum S.A., South Petroleum Limited, Baltik Petroleum Trading Limited, Petroval S.A., PFH Atlantic Petroleum Limited and Karran Tankers Limited as property obtained as a result of criminal actions committed by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former CEO of YUKOS, Platon Lebedev, the head of the MENATEP company, and other people involved in the YUKOS case.

Bank accounts of YUKOS’s lawyers Vasily Aleksanyan and Anton Drel, Alexander Temerko, a member of the Board of Directors of YUKOS Moscow, and the head of the legal service of the company GLM Management Serviñe, were also frozen as property owned by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Platon Lebedev, Vladimir Dubov and others accused in the YUKOS case.

Earlier, lawyers of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Platon Lebedev and Vladimir Dubov appealed against the decision of the Basmanny Court of March 12, 2004, sanctioning the freezing of $5bn in Swiss bank accounts of YUKOS shareholders and several other people. The Moscow City Court has not yet considered the complaint, and no date has been set for the hearing.

The Swiss law firms Poncet Turrettini Amaudruz & Associes and Greenberg & Traurig, representing Group MENATEP, have recently announced their decision to appeal against the decision of the Swiss government to freeze the assets of the group.