The key facts
- The FTS demands that Khodorkovsky pay 5,573 thousand rubles in pension contributions for 2012–2019
- The lawsuit was filed by Moscow tax inspectorate No. 2; the case is being heard by the Meshchansky Court of Moscow
- A preliminary hearing is scheduled for December 1; no decision on the merits yet
The tax service has gone to court
The Federal Tax Service has demanded that Mikhail Khodorkovsky* pay more than 5.5 million rubles in arrears on pension contributions. This became known at a hearing of the Meshchansky Court of Moscow, reports Life.ru. The lawsuit was filed by the capital's tax inspectorate No. 2; the total amount of the claims is 5 million 573 thousand rubles.
The essence of the claims
According to the Federal Tax Service, the arrears arose from unpaid contributions to the Pension Fund for the period from 2012 to 2019. The court explained that these are obligations under the unified social tax. There is no final decision on the lawsuit yet: the court has scheduled a preliminary hearing for December 1, after which the proceedings are to continue. Thus, the claimed amount remains, for now, merely a demand by the inspectorate that the service still has to prove.
Previous proceedings
This is not the only recent case: on October 18, a Moscow court imposed on Khodorkovsky a fine of 50 thousand rubles for publishing materials about the Russian Armed Forcesthat the court found unreliable — the case concerned English-language posts on a foreign internet platform. Earlier in his biography: the 2005 verdict (fraud and tax evasion, nine years of imprisonment) and the 2010 verdict (embezzlement and money laundering), release in December 2013 after a pardon, and an in-absentia arrest in 2015 in the case of the murder of Nefteyugansk mayor Vladimir Petukhov.
Note
* Recognized in Russia as a foreign agent and included by Rosfinmonitoring in the list of terrorists and extremists.
