PROSECUTORS GO AFTER YUKOS'S FOREIGN MANAGERS

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MOSCOW, Nov 25 (RIA Novosti) - Yesterday, Bruce Misamore, the financial director of the Yukos oil major and an American citizen, was summoned to the Prosecutor General's Office for questioning.

A year ago, Yukos's representatives explained that the company had hired many foreign top managers (about ten) on purpose: they were to become a kind of shield against law-enforcement bodies that were unlikely to risk an international scandal. Yesterday, however this voluntary embargo was broken, Vedomosti reports.

According to a Yukos spokesman, Mr. Misamore was asked to give evidence in the criminal case launched last summer about the company's alleged embezzlement of 31 billion rubles ($1 equals 28.4 rubles) in 2001 through the use of opaque schemes. Yesterday, however, Mr. Misamore was attending a meeting of the company's management in London, but he was to return to Moscow on the same day or Thursday.

Yukos is afraid that this is just the beginning and that now law-enforcers will go after other foreign managers as well. Lawyers say that in this situation foreign citizens, unless they are diplomats, do not have any special privileges.

Meanwhile it has become known that Yukos's top foreign managers have left Russia in fear of their safety. The decision may have been taking at the London meeting, where Mr. Misamore announced that he was not going to return to Russia before he was sure that his "freedom and safety [were] not threatened."

"The combat effectiveness of the Yukos management was undermined long ago," says Steven Dashevsky, the chief analyst at Aton Investment. He recalls that last week prosecutors detained Alexei Kurtsin, Yukos's deputy chief of administration, and issued warrants for the arrest of another three top managers, chief lawyer Dmitry Gololobov, first vice president Mikhail Trushin and senior vice president Alexander Temerko.

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