President Vladimir Putin gave his blessing on Friday for Russian state energy firms to bid for oil major Yukos's assets if bailiffs put them up for sale to recover a huge back-tax bill.
"The government is not seeking to nationalise Yukos, to pocket it," Putin told a media industry conference.
"But if it comes to a sale of assets, or something like that, then any company, including under state ownership, could participate."
Putin's comments confirmed investors' fears that Yukos may pay the ultimate price for the political ambitions of its founder, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and that its Siberian oil units could fall into the hands of state-controlled energy firms.
Khodorkovsky is now on trial for fraud and tax evasion, while his firm faces a total of $7 billion in back taxes for 2000-2001. Investors say the bill could grow to over $10 billion after audits of 2002-2004.
Russia's top oil exporter has managed to pay back a total of $2.2-$2.4 billion. It has repeatedly asked the state to let it sell non-core assets to raise cash, and to unfreeze its bank accounts to fund its daily operations.
Bailiffs have threatened instead to sell Yukos's Siberian oil unit Yugansk, which produces 60 percent of the firm's total output of 1.7 million barrels per day.
The government has hired Western bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein to value Yugansk, which analysts say is worth around $16 billion, a sum that no Russian firm could afford.
But analysts say the valuation, expected before the end of September, could be far lower if the state makes good on its threat to withdraw Yugansk's oil production licences for failing to pay current taxes.
"The revoking of the licences would dramatically reduce the value of Yugansk from our rough estimate of $20 billion to no more than $2 billion," said Steven Dashevsky, an oil analyst at Aton brokerage in Moscow.
Vladimir Savov from Nikoil said that, despite market expectations that DrKW would come out with a reasonably high valuation of Yugansk, he believed the state was not interested in selling the assets at a high price.
"With the Yugansk reserves withdrawal decision a week away, we advise investors to steer clear of Yukos stock," Raiffeisen Bank said in a report. Troika Dialog also said the withdrawal was the biggest threat to Yukos's survival.
Analysts have long tipped gas monopoly Gazprom and state oil firm Rosneft as the main contenders for Yugansk, adding the state would find a way to sideline Western majors from bidding.
Those predictions have been strengthened by a Kremlin decision this month to merge Gazprom and Rosneft to boost the state's ownership of the world's largest gas firm. Gazprom has, however, denied any interest in buying Yukos's assets.
Putin denied the merger was linked to the Yugansk auction, but said the Kremlin would continue to reassert its control over the energy sector lost in the privatisations that took place under his predecessor Boris Yeltsin.
"In this country, you may have noticed, the overwhelming majority of energy companies are private, as opposed to OPEC states where all oil and gas industries are state-owned," Putin said.
