© AFP 2018 / JIM WATSON
Having spent a decade in prison in Russia after being found guilty of tax evasion and embezzlement, Khodorkovsky, once Russia's richest man, may now face more charges. A new probe into his activities, launched by the Russian Prosecutor General's Office, has revealed that the businessman laid his hands on the now-defunct oil giant as a result of a shady deal, the report by the Russia's NTV Channel says.
It reveals that, in the mid-1990s, Khodorkovsky managed to win the right for his companies to buy almost 80 percent of Yukos's shares by bribing the company's management. The businessman allegedly promised the then-Yukos director Sergey Muravlenko and three more top managers to pay them an equivalent of 15 percent of the oil giant's shares - or some $2 billion - Salavat Karimov, an adviser to Russia's Prosecutor General, told NTV.
"He indeed transferred hundreds of millions [of dollars] to the offshore accounts opened in the names of these four Yukos top managers," Karimov said.
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