The Federal Court of Switzerland has partially annulled the order of the Federal Prosecutor’s Office to freeze the Swiss bank accounts of several shareholders of the Russian Yukos oil company and the Menatep holding group

The Federal Court of Switzerland has partially annulled the order of the Federal Prosecutor’s Office to freeze the Swiss bank accounts of several shareholders of the Russian Yukos oil company and the Menatep holding group, RIA-Novosti news agency reports, citing a source in the law firm representing the shareholders of the two companies in Switzerland. The Federal Court fulfilled “at least a part of the appeals” over the decision to block the bank accounts, the source said. Genrikh Padva, a lawyer for the former head of the Yukos oil company, Mikhail Khodorkovskiy, has confirmed the news. “I know this for a fact,” Padva told RIA-Novosti. “We did not attend this hearing, but we got in touch with our Swiss colleagues and they said the Swiss court had rescinded the ruling on the freezing of the accounts,” the lawyer said. Padva said the ruling applied to only one company in the Yukos structure. He could not specify which company’s accounts had been frozen, or at which bank. The news has not yet been confirmed by the Swiss court authorities. At the end of March the Swiss Prosecutor’s Office conducted searches and seized documents in several Swiss cities within the so-called Yukos case. This was done at request of Russian prosecutors who accuse key shareholders of the company of gross fraud and the company itself of massive tax evasion. At the same time, the Swiss authorities froze over $4 billion worth of assets in Swiss bank accounts which reportedly belonged to several Yukos shareholders. Lawyers representing Yukos and Menatep shareholders filed nine appeals against the decision to freeze the accounts. Three of the appeals were turned down in early June.