MOSCOW, January 16 (RIA Novosti) - Former executives of bankrupt oil company Yukos will face new embezzlement and money laundering charges, Russia's top prosecutor said Tuesday.
"We are currently involved in active work on Yukos, and are conducting necessary examinations and other investigative measures," Yury Chaika said without naming the executives who will face new charges.
He said investigators are currently working with a number of former Yukos executives and officials, including those who returned to Russia.
"We give them no special guarantees [against prosecution]. We tell them the court will punish you if you are guilty, but that cooperation with the investigation will be taken into account," he said.
Chaika confirmed that Russia's top prosecutors will ask British authorities to investigate the death of Yukos co-founder Yury Golubev, 65, who was found dead in his London apartment January 8.
"We want to ask our British colleagues to closely study the circumstances of his death, as we do not rule out there could be a criminal version," Chaika said.
Golubev, a long-time business partner of jailed Yukos founder Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was an important witness in the Prosecutor General's Office's ongoing case against a number of Yukos senior executives.
The London Metropolitan Police said a post mortem showed his "death was by natural causes," but a Russian law enforcement source said there is reason to believe that he died a violent death.
Khodorkovsky and his former business partner Platon Lebedev have been serving eight-year sentences in Siberia since 2005 for fraud and tax evasion.
The former tycoon - who acquired his company during controversial privatization deals in the early 1990s - has insisted his case was orchestrated by the authorities to silence his criticism of President Vladimir Putin and as part of a campaign to bring mineral assets under Kremlin control.
Chaika said a criminal case was launched against policemen who guarded Antonio Valdes Garcia, also an associate of Khodorkovsky, at his apartment in Moscow. The latter escaped from police guard, but Chaika said he "is not a key witness" in the Yukos case.
The former director of the Yukos trading company Fargoil, Garcia, who holds dual Spanish-Russian citizenship, is suspected of being involved in money laundering.
Chaika also said Russian prosecutors want Israel to cancel the citizenship of wanted former Yukos co-chairman Leonid Nevzlin, who is suspected of several grave crimes.
"We believe that Nevzlin obtained his Israeli citizenship illegally," Chaika said.
"An Israeli lawyer is representing our interests in Israel, and we are working proactively to have his citizenship annulled through the Israeli courts," he said.
