Jailed Russian tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky said on Wednesday he had handed control of Yukos to a close ally, as prosecutors stepped up efforts to seize the stricken oil major's offshore assets. Khodorkovsky ceded his 60 percent stake in Gibraltar holding firm Menatep, which controls Yukos, to exiled business partner Leonid Nevzlin after the Kremlin effectively nationalised Yukos's core oil unit, Yuganskneftegaz, last month.
"After the sale of Yuganskneftegaz I was relieved of responsibility for the remaining business and for the group's money. Full stop," Khodorkovsky said in a statement issued via his lawyers during his trial for fraud and tax evasion.
Analysts said Khodorkovsky's decision to part with assets which once made him Russia's richest man - worth an estimated $15 billion - may be aimed at preserving what remains of his business empire.
Yugansk, which pumped 1 million barrels a day of oil or 60 percent of Yukos's total output, was sold at auction on December 19 for $9.4 billion to recover punitive tax claims against Yukos totalling over $27 billion.
The winner of the auction was an unknown company called Baikal Finans, registered at a bar in a provincial Russian town.
State oil firm Rosneft later took over Baikal Finans and has installed its own management team at Yugansk. How Rosneft funded the purchase remains a mystery.
Yukos filed for bankruptcy in the United States in a failed bid to halt the auction. It has vowed to press $20 billion in damages claims against any participant in the Yugansk auction.
Separately, state prosecutors said they had asked the Swiss authorities to investigate the affairs of Veteran Petroleum Trust, which owns 10 percent of Yukos stock and was set up to run a staff pension fund.
First Deputy Prosecutor General Yuri Biryukov said recent arrests of Yukos managers were linked to money laundering which he alleged was continuing.
"There is a shadow economy in Western companies - but the share doesn't exceed 30 percent. The other 70 percent is transparent," Biryukov said in an interview posted on the Web site of the General Prosecutor's Office. "With Yukos, it's the other way round."
Russian prosecutors won a freeze last year on assets held by Veteran Petroleum, then worth nearly $5 billion, but the Swiss supreme court later unfroze the assets on appeal by Yukos, which denied any wrongdoing. Khodorkovsky, in an acid statement delivered to his trial court from his defendant's cage, denied having any money stashed abroad.
"Billions of dollars from nowhere to nowhere, with no accounting trail? It makes one think of Baikal Finans," he said.
The 41-year-old, arrested at gunpoint in October 2003, said he expected to be found guilty but denounced his seven-month-old trial as a travesty of justice.
"My faith in Russian justice has been exploded by the actions of this court and the fantasies dreamt up by the prosecution," said Khodorkovsky, who wore blue jeans and a loose jerkin and was flanked by co-defendant Platon Lebedev.
Khodorkovsky faces 10 years in jail if convicted, but it is not yet clear when his trial will finish.
Nevzlin took control of Khodorkovsky's stake in Gibraltar-based Menatep under a shareholder agreement foreseeing a transfer of ownership if Yukos were stripped of substantial assets, the Vedomosti daily reported.