A Moscow arbitration court granted a request by Russian tax authorities barring Yukos, the country's largest crude oil producer, from selling any assets, including stock, the court said on Friday.
The ban can be appealed and a preliminary hearing into the tax suit was scheduled for May 7, the court said.
Yukos said that it would appeal the Tax Ministry's "accusatory and prejudiced" ruling on the company's past tax payments. "The freezing of the company's property doesn't correspond with the Tax Ministry's claims against it," Yukos said in a statement to Dow Jones Newswires.
The Tax Ministry sued Yukos for 99.37 billion rubles, or US$3.5 billion, but Yukos rejected the claim when it was put forward in December. Yukos has said that any tax minimization schemes it employed were legal at the time, and widely used by other Russian oil companies.
Yukos officials also said that the oil trading companies that are said to owe the taxes are not related to Yukos itself.
The ban by the Moscow Arbitration Court appeared to seek some guarantee that Yukos would have the money to pay tax arrears and fines if the company eventually lost the case against it.
Yukos is allowed to sell only "its main products," meaning crude oil, the court said. The court also barred the company from introducing any changes to the shareholders' register.
Yukos dismissed the court decision, saying that it would not affect day-to-day operations, and vowed to contest it.
"This decision is not final," a Yukos spokesman, Alexander Shadrin, told Echo Moskvy radio. "The judicial process will be lengthy. This will not affect our current operations or the fulfillment of our obligations towards our partners, work force and the government in terms of tax payments."
Analysts have said they consider the tax charges against Yukos part of a broader Kremlin campaign against Mikhail Khodorkovsky, founder of Yukos and Russia's wealthiest man, as well as other core Yukos shareholders.
The campaign against Yukos began after Khodorkovsky financed opposition parties ahead of parliamentary elections last year, in defiance of Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, who had asked the country's top "oligarchs," or billionaire tycoons, to stay out of politics in exchange for not revisiting the previous decade's controversial privatizations. Khodorkovsky was arrested last October and has since been in prison awaiting trial.
Yukos will file a complaint with the European Court of Human Rights next week over harassment by the Tax Ministry, Shadrin said.
Yukos will also resume legal action against the deputy tax minister, Igor Golikov, whose action, Shadrin added, is "aimed at inflicting damages on the oil company and runs counter to the law on government service."
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