Further information as extracted from the Global Security Report:
"RUSSIA - Yukos ordered to stop selling oil
Russian authorities have ordered oil giant Yukos to stop selling oil, the company has said. Bailiffs said sales were to cease at Yukos' main
production units, whose 1.7 million barrels of oil a day make up 20% of Russia's oil output. Yukos chief executive Stephen Theede said, "My
assumption was that it was a misinterpretation. It does not seem logical to me for the bailiffs to take action to immediately stop production," he
told correspondents in Nizhnevartosk in Siberia. "We have no choice but to comply with what the bailiffs ask us to do, but sometimes it's a matter
of getting an interpretation." According to news agencies, the justice ministry told Yukos to stop selling property - an effective ban on oil sales.
"It should be pointed out that the process of providing oil into the... pipeline system cannot be ceased without stopping... all of the companies'
activities," a Yukos spokesperson said. This "will lead to the unemployment of 15,000 employees of the companies", it warned. The justice ministry,
however, dismissed the claim. "I am officially announcing that the company will have no problems, including with paying wages, as a result of a
freeze of its accounts," justice minister Yury Chaika was quoted by Russian news agencies as saying. The order appears to have had no impact on
agreements to transport crude and petroleum products out of the Baltic and Black Sea, ship brokers told Reuters. "
**See credits from today's Global Security Report for 07/28/04**






