18.02.2020

The Hague Court of Appeal reinstates Arbitral Awards

The Hague Court of Appeal has today reinstated the Arbitral Awards of 2014, which order the Russian Federation to compensate the former Yukos majority shareholders for the unlawful expropriation of their investment. The Awards amount to more than $50 billion, a measure of the company’s success before it was destroyed.

Tim Osborne, GML’s chief executive, commented: “This is a victory for the rule of law. The independent courts of a democracy have shown their integrity and served justice. A brutal kleptocracy has been held to account.”

In July 2014, an independent international Arbitral Tribunal in The Hague ruled unanimously that the Russian state had unlawfully expropriated Yukos Oil, the country’s most successful company and largest taxpayer. The Tribunal found that “Russian courts bent to the will of Russian executive authorities to bankrupt Yukos, assign its assets to a state-controlled company [Rosneft] and incarcerate a man [Mikhail Khodorkovsky] who gave signs of becoming a political competitor.”

Today’s ruling fully reinstates the Arbitral Awards of 2014, and overturns the bizarre 2016 decision of the District Court of The Hague to set them aside. The former Yukos majority shareholders believed that the District Court’s decision was fundamentally flawed, and therefore appealed it to The Hague Court of Appeal, submitting thousands of pages of legal submissions, evidence and witness statements.