Russian prosecutors have demanded for Swiss authorities to seize nearly...
Russian prosecutors have demanded for Swiss authorities to seize nearly $5 billion held in bank accounts by executives of the Yukos oil company, increasing the Kremlin-backed onslaught against the jailed Russian billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky days before presidential elections.
Bank accounts belonging to 20 Russians, including Mr Khodorkovsky, the former chief executive of Yukos, and two of his colleagues, Platon Lebedev and Leonid Nevzlin, are said to have been frozen.
A spokeswoman for the prosecutors told the Interfax news agency that five accounts at different Swiss banks "holding a total of approximately $ 5bn ( ё3bn) were blocked following a request by the Russian prosecutor general's office".
She said it was not related to "assets, shares and other securities, but to personal cash deposits by private individuals somehow or another implicated in the misappropriation of particularly large amounts of state funds".
Other accounts belonged to Vladimir Dubov and Mikhail Brudno, two key Yukos shareholders living with Mr Nevzlin in self-imposed exile in Israel.
