Homes of Yukos Managers Searched

Russian authorities have searched the homes of dozens of managers working for oil company Yukos in what one board member described as a massive campaign reminiscent of the Stalinist purges, the Russian news agency Interfax reported Sunday.

Interfax quoted the unidentified Yukos board member as saying that dozens of Yukos managers in Moscow and across Russia have been targeted in a far-ranging official investigation, and many of them have had their homes searched at night.

The board member compared the searches to Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s Great Terror of 1937.

“People are afraid to stay home at night; they fear for their relatives,” Interfax quoted the official as saying.

Yukos executives and officials at Russia’s prosecutor general’s office were unavailable for comment Sunday.

Yukos and its subsidiaries face tax claims totaling more than $23 billion for 2000-2003, and the Russian government announced Friday that it would sell a majority stake in the company’s core production unit Yuganskneftegaz to cover the tax bill.

Yukos founder Mikhail Khodorkovsky has been in jail for more than a year on separate charges including fraud and tax evasion.

The Yukos case has been widely seen as a Kremlin-inspired effort to punish Khodorkovsky for funding opposition parties and put Yukos assets into Kremlin-friendly hands, tightening the state’s control over the oil industry.

President Vladimir V. Putin has denied that the Yukos probe was politically motivated, casting it as part of an effort to combat tax evasion and shady bookkeeping.

He reaffirmed these arguments in an interview with Brazilian media that was published Sunday on the Kremlin website.

“It’s wrong to substitute the criminal aspect of this problem with politics,” Putin said.

“Every person, irrespective of his post, material well-being and degree of influence on state bodies, must respect the law. All people are equal before the law, they must respect it, pay the due taxes and, correspondingly, bear responsibility if they break it.”