MOSCOW (AFP) - The Russian government aims to bankrupt oil giant Yukos and seize its main assets for the state, its chairman Viktor Gerashchenko said in a newspaper interview published.
"The principal task of state structures is to drive Yukos into bankruptcy and fold its assets into (gas monopoly) Gazprom or another state holding," he told the Kommersant business daily.
Gerashchenko, a well-connected former central bank governor who was named chairman in June in a bid by Yukos to resolve its bitter dispute with the Kremlin, expressed pessimism about the chances of survival of Russia's top oil producer.
"I note that apart from the president (Vladimir Putin), only Kudrin (Russian finance minister Alexei Kudrin) has said the government is not interested in seeing Yukos go bankrupt," he said.
The more than year-long campaign against Yukos, which has been slapped with multi-billion dollar tax demands, is aimed at removing the company from the control of tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, its jailed largest shareholder, Gerashchenko added.
"The government is afraid that Khodorkovsky will manage to hang on as co-owner despite all the efforts to take Yukos away from him," he said.
Khodorkovsky, Russia's richest man who faces a 10-year sentence for fraud and tax evasion, is believed to have angered the Kremlin by openly financing opposition parties and aggressively lobbying his commercial interests in parliament.
Tax authorities have already demanded more than 7.5 billion dollars (6.1 billion euros) in back taxes for 2000 and 2001 and the final bill could be significantly in excess of 10 billion dollars.
Yukos, the largest Russian oil exporter which pumps one in five barrels of oil in Russia, has paid off more than two billion dollars of the 2000 tax bill thanks to soaring world crude prices but is in a losing race against time.
The natural resources ministry may next week consider revoking the licenses from Yuganskneftegaz, which accounts for 60 percent of Yukos's oil output and which is due to be auctioned to meet tax demands, an official was quoted by the ITAR-TASS news agency Tuesday as saying.
The licenses could be revoked due to Yukos delaying payments on current taxes including extraction tax, Yukos's spokesman Alexander Shadrin was quoted by ITAR-TASS as saying.
Analysts have speculated that Gazprom, which will become more than 50-percent state-owned after it merges with state oil producer Rosneft later this year, may bid for Yuganskneftegaz to create a national oil and gas giant..