According to him, the freeze will complicate the process of paying RUR 99.4bn (about $3.4bn) in back taxes and fines for 2000. Mr. Gerashchenko said YUKOS sent a letter to Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov on June 9 offering negotiations, but there had been no response yet.

Commenting on the refusal of court bailiffs to take YUKOS’s 35 percent stake in Sibneft as payment for the tax claim, Mr. Gerashchenko said the bailiffs had done "a stupid thing". "I believe this is a stupid thing and a provocation against the Russian President's statement that the government is not interested in YUKOS going bankrupt," he said. According to him, the market value of the Sibneft stake is more than $4.2bn, which is much more than YUKOS's tax debts.

YUKOS’s creditors have not yet served the company with a default notice, according to Mr. Gerashchenko. He said Russian Finance Minister Alexey Kudrin had met with the representatives of the banks and assured them that YUKOS would not go bankrupt.

Asked about an additional RUR 98bn ($3.4bn) tax claim against YUKOS for the fiscal year 2001, Mr. Gerashchenko did not rule out further tax claims for 2002 and 2003. But he said these issues “were solvable”.

On May 19, YUKOS said it had received a possible event of default notice from its lenders. The notice, related to a $1.6bn pre-export credit facility, was prompted by the Russian Tax Ministry's RUR 99.375bn (about $3.4bn) claim against YUKOS for unpaid taxes and a court order to ban any sale or transfer of assets in relation to the claim. On April 26, a group of commercial banks warned YUKOS of a potential default on a $1bn secured loan it took last year.

At a hearing of the Moscow Arbitration Court on Friday, a YUKOS representative said the freeze on YUKOS assets threatened the company’s ability to fulfill its obligations to foreign banks. He stressed that the asset freeze, imposed on April 15, could lead to a default on the company’s debts to foreign partners. The value of the frozen assets was 5.5 times the size of the tax claim, the YUKOS official said.

For his part, a representative of the Tax Ministry rejected YUKOS’s arguments that the asset freeze did not allow it to pay the tax bill. According to him, the freeze did not affect the company’s core business – oil production and refining and sales of oil and oil products.