MOSCOW (AFP) - Russian President Vladimir Putin gave the go-ahead for state firms to bid for the assets of oil giant Yukos if they are sold to pay off multi-billion-dollar tax debts, but denied the aim was to nationalise the company.
"The state has not set a goal of nationalising this company, and there is no such goal today," he told a meeting of international media executives in Moscow.
"If this situation leads to the sale of assets, of course, any company including state firms could participate in this," Putin added.
"But I repeat that there has not been and will not be any goal of nationalisation, seizing it for the state."
Troubled Yukos is facing the forced sale at auction of its main production asset, Yuganskneftegaz, which accounts for 60 percent of the firm's oil output, to pay off more than 7.5 billion dollars in back-tax demands by the state.
Russia's number one oil producer accuses the Kremlin of artificially driving it towards bankruptcy as a political vendetta against its main owner, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who is in jail facing a 10-year sentence for fraud and tax evasion.
Russia's richest tycoon spent part of his vast fortune on financing parties opposed to President Putin and aggressively lobbied in parliament for his oil empire in direct confrontation with state energy interests.
Analysts said Putin's comments marked the first time that he had raised the possibility of state-run concerns buying assets of Yukos, which has been locked in a desperate fight for survival with the Kremlin for more than a year.
"Nationalisation means confiscation without compensation, bidding at auction is completely different. No one can restrict a state-owned company from pursuing whatever business opportunities are there in the Russian economy," said Steven Dashevsky, head of research at Moscow brokerage ATON.
Gazprom, the state gas monopoly which is to take over state oil firm Rosneft later this year to form a new energy monolith, is believed to be a prime candidate to buy Yukanskneftegaz although a lack of cash is a problem.
Amid speculation about long-standing plans by hawkish Kremlin officials to create a state-owned oil and gas giant like Saudi state oil company Aramco, Putin denied Gazprom was maneouvring to swallow up Yukos.
"Yukos and the announcement of the merger of Gazprom and Rosneft are absolutely not linked," he said.
To counter suspicions that it could engineer a rock-bottom sale, the Russian government hired Western investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein to carry out an independent valuation of Yuganskneftegaz -- whose value is currently estimated at 15 to 17 billion dollars.
However, the natural resources ministry has threatened to revoke the licence of Yuganskneftegaz due to Yukos's delay of payments on current taxes including extraction tax, which would massively drive down the value of the production unit.
"The assets without the license are worth somewhere between two to 3.5 billion dollars," said Ron Smith, an oil and gas analyst at Renaissance Capital.
Yukos, which pumps one in five barrels of oil in Russia, has paid off more than two billion dollars of the tax bill thanks to soaring world crude prices but is in a losing race against time.
Its chairman Viktor Gerashchenko in a newspaper interview published Wednesday accused the Russian government of aiming to bankrupt Yukos and seize its main assets for the state.
"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.