MOSCOW - Russia's crippled oil firm Yukos has denied involvement in an international money-laundering ring broken up by authorities in Spain in what officials there described as the largest operation of its kind ever carried out by Spanish law enforcement.
"This is nonsense," a spokesman for Yukos, Alexander Shadrin, told the Russian radio station Echo Moskvi on Saturday. "The next thing they'll say is that we were laundering money on Mars. That is my official comment."
The reaction came after Spanish officials announced they had broken up an international money-laundering network worth 250 million euros (337 million dollars) and arrested 41 people including citizens of Finland, France, Morocco, Russia, Spain and Ukraine, some of them lawyers.
The Spanish interior ministry said in a statement that the money-laundering operation involved capital and real estate dealings by several organised crime groups centred on the Costa del Sol which is popular with foreign tourists.
The ministry said in a statement that large sums of money were believed to have been diverted from the Russian oil giant Yukos to a Dutch company and then to one of its Spanish branches.
It said it was its largest operation yet against money laundering, lasting 10 months and involving more than 300 officers.
The arrests were first announced late Friday by Spanish anti-corruption police, who said people had been detained around Marbella.
Russian authorities had assisted Spanish police in their investigations, it said. The Russian prosecutor general's office declined over the weekend to comment on news of the operation.
A number of bank accounts were frozen and two private planes, a boat and 42 luxury cars were impounded during the police operation.
The ministry said there could be further arrests.
03/13/2005 09:30 GMT