The Moscow City Court on Tuesday upheld the Basmanny court's ruling to freeze the Swiss bank accounts of the Yukos oil company's main trader Petroval and remove the trader's documents

The Moscow City Court on Tuesday upheld the Basmanny court's ruling to freeze the Swiss bank accounts of the Yukos oil company's main trader Petroval and remove the trader's documents. Moscow City Court also upheld a ruling to freeze the bank accounts of Yukos's lawyers Anton Drel and Vasily Aleksanian and remove documents of a number of Yukos shareholders, including Vladimir Dubov, from Swiss banks. To date, no Petroval clients have dropped the company, whose only shareholder is Dutch-registered Yukos Finance BV, which is directly owned by Yukos-Moscow. Petroval supplies oil and oil products thorough the Baltic, White and Black seas and through ports in the Far East, and has annual sales of $11 billion. Petroval also supplies Yukos oil to China through Mongolia. Mazeikiu Nafta, in which Yukos has a 53.7% stake, cooperates with Petroval to export about 55% of its produce through ports in the Baltic. On March 18 Moscow's Basmanny Court sanctioned the seizure of foreign accounts held by Aleksanian and Drel. Khodorkovsky's lawyer Genrikh Padva said that these accounts were seized at the request of the Russian Prosecutor General as containing funds acquired by the lawyers' clients by illegal means. He said that in its appeal to the Basmanny Court, the Prosecutor General's Office said that based on the charges that have been laid against former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Menatep chief Platon Lebedev, the prosecution has grounds to assume that part of the funds earned by illegal means are being laundered in Swiss banks and accounts held by over 20 companies and 24 individuals, including Drel and Aleksanian. The lawyer said that the Basmanny Court passed this ruling on March 18 without any investigation. He said that the court did not check whether there were any funds in the lawyers' accounts.