Russ Oil-Gas

MOSCOW, August 13 (RIA Novosti) - Russian state-controlled crude producer Rosneft [RTS: ROSN] said Monday it had filed an application for an auction to sell an overseas subsidiary of the now bankrupt oil firm Yukos. Rosneft did not specify whether its parent company or its subsidiary, Neft-Aktiv, which has experience participating in Yukos auctions, would bid for Dutch-based Yukos Finance, which owns the bankrupt firm's overseas assets. Russia's federal property fund has set the auction for August 15, with a starting bid price of 7.6 billion rubles (about $298 million). The parent company Yukos, once Russia's largest oil company, was declared bankrupt August 1, 2006, after three years of litigation with tax authorities over arrears. Its founder, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, is serving an eight-year prison sentence in Siberia for fraud and tax evasion. Through a series of liquidation auctions, Yukos has repaid around 400 billion rubles ($16 billion) to creditors. The company's key production and refining assets have been bought up by Rosneft at or following auctions, making the state-controlled company one of the country's leading crude producers.