(MENAFN- AFP) The European Court of Human Rights on Thursday ordered Russia to pay former shareholders in defunct oil giant Yukos almost 1.9 billion euros ($2.5 billion).
The ruling comes just days after an international arbitration court in The Hague made a similar order for a record $50 billion in compensation over Russia's seizure of the company once owned by Kremlin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
The decision by the rights court in Strasbourg related to tax claims by Moscow which forced Yukos into bankruptcy in 2007 - but was rejected by Russia as not fair or impartial.
In its majority ruling, the court said the "disproportionate character of the enforcement proceedings had significantly contributed to Yukos' liquidation".
Representatives of some 55,000 former shareholders had been seeking damages of almost 38 billion euros.
In September 2011, the court had found that certain parts of the tax enforcement procedures against Yukos were a breach of shareholders' fundamental rights.
On Thursday, the court ordered Russia to divide the 1.9 billion euros between the shareholders "as they had stood at the time of the company's liquidation".
Former Yukos executive and shareholder Leonid Nevzlin said "the verdict shows that the Russian government did not try to find a compromise" in the dispute.
He said Yukos had been forced to pay taxes and penalties over several years that surpassed the company's income.
"I think this was obviously senseless, and that the Russian government was penalised for this obvious senselessness," he told the Echo of Moscow radio station.
Yukos was once Russia's biggest oil company but was broken up after Khodorkovsky was arrested in 2003, shortly after President Vladimir Putin warned Russia's growing class of oligarchs against meddling in politics.
The company was sold off in a series of opaque auctions between 2004 and 2006, with state-owned Rosneft buying up most of its operations.
Russia is already under pressure over the conflict in Ukraine, after the United States and the European Union this week imposed tough new sanctions on key financial, arms and energy sectors.
After the European court ruling, Russia's justice ministry said it "does not consider the verdict to be a fair and impartial approach to the evaluation of the legal and factual situation in the case".
The ministry said in a statement it had three months to appeal the case without saying whether Russia would do so.
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