Belgian authorities decided to unblock Russian embassy accounts that had been frozen over legal claims by stackeholders of former oil company Yukos, the country’s Foreign Minister Didier Reynders said Saturday.
"A solution has been found to unblock as a priority accounts for the running of the embassies, and the rest will follow," a ministry spokesman said quoting Reynders.
The Russian Embassy’s accounts at ING Bank as well as the country’s representative offices to the EU and NATO are among those to be unblocked first, Belgian Foreign Ministry spokesman Henrik Van de Velde said.
According to Belgian news agency Belga, the foreign minister told journalists in China that the previously frozen assets were unblocked, including the Russian embassy accounts in Belgium. The other accounts, according to Reynders, will be unfrozen on Monday. The minister also praised cooperation with Russia’s embassy, Yukos lawyers and banks.
Earlier, Belgium, France and Austria began seizing Russian state-owned property in connection to a lawsuit by former Yukos shareholders, who claimed that Russian authorities had illegally forced the company out of business in order to enable Rosneft to obtain its assets at knockdown prices and become the country’s largest oil producer.
Moscow's court of arbitration declared Yukos bankrupt in 2006. State-run Rosneft subsequently purchased about 80 percent of the company's assets.
In July 2014, the court in the Hague ruled to award former Yukos co-owners a total of $50 billion in compensation, the largest arbitration award in history.
