There can’t be many compensation claims with legal costs in the millions and damages in double-digit billions. Perhaps one of them is Trump v BBC — I have updated yesterday’s piece to include the judge’s threat to throw out the case after the president’s lawyers missed a deadline. But not even Donald Trump is claiming as much as arbitrators have awarded the former majority shareholders in Yukos Oil — which was Russia’s largest privately owned energy business until the Putin government appropriated its assets between 2003 and 2007. With interest, the amount they are now owed is more than $66 billion.
Risking millions in the hope of recovering billions is not for the faint-hearted. I wrote a detailed account of the Yukos claim at the beginning of 2008 and returned to it in 2016, then in 2021, in 2024 and once again in 2024. But it was not until I read Suing the Kremlin, a new book by the former BBC Moscow correspondent Martin Sixsmith, that I began to understand how a few individuals acquired unimaginable wealth and why some if them paid for it with their lives.
Sixsmith shared his insights into the case — and gave me his view of the outcome — when I recorded this week’s episode of A Lawyer Talks at his home in London. My podcast interview, as always, is a bonus for paying subscribers to A Lawyer Writes. Everyone else can hear a short taster by clicking the ► symbol on the graphic at the top of this page.
