The Dutch Supreme Court overturned a previous ruling on Friday that ordered Russia to pay a $50 billion arbitration award to former shareholders of the Yukos company.
The court said it canceled a decision by an appeal court at the Hague.
It accepted one of Russia's objections to the appeal court’s decision and rejected two others.
The Court scrapped the award on grounds that the Russian government's objections that Yukos' former shareholders had committed irregularities in arbitral proceedings were not considered and adequately investigated by the Hague appeals court.
The court threw the case back to the Amsterdam Court of Appeal.
- Ongoing case since 2014
In 2014, an international arbitration court ruled that Russia had to pay $50 billion in compensation to Yukos’s three former shareholders on grounds that it manipulated the legal system to bankrupt Yukos, and jail its boss, Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
Russia appealed the decision in the Hague District Court and the court upheld the decision in 2020, which ordered Russia to pay compensation to the shareholders.
Russia took the case to the Dutch Supreme Court.
Also, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled in 2011 that Russia violated the right to a fair trial on grounds that Yukos' lawyers were not given the necessary time to defend.
- Khodorkovsky spend 10 years in prison
Khodorkovsky was once Russia's richest businessman, who transformed Yukos into the country’s largest private oil company after the collapse of the former Soviet Union.
But Khodorkovsky was found guilty of fraud and tax evasion and was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
The businessman was released from prison following a pardon from President Vladimir Putin.
After Yukos went bankrupt, most of the shares were taken over by state-owned company, Rosneft.
