MOSCOW, May 14 - RAPSI. The Moscow Simonovsky District Court satisfied on Monday an application filed by the relatives of former YUKOS Vice President Vasily Aleksanyan to release his property.

The judge has released his Mercedes and homes in the Moscow Region.

The property arrest was imposed as part of an embezzlement case against the former VP. The case was later dismissed as the statute of limitations had expired.
As a result, the measure of restraint was cancelled, the deposit was returned and the decision not to satisfy lawsuits under the case was passed.

Aleksanyan died on October 3, 2011 at the age of 39. He was arrested in 2006 together with other top YUKOS managers on charges of stealing property from Tomskneft and shares in refineries and oil producing companies owned by the Eastern Oil Company.

Aleksanyan spent nearly 2.5 years in prison. His lawyers asked for his pretrial conditions to be amended due to his poor health, but his custodial sentence was later extended.

On February 8, 2008, the former top manager was moved from the pretrial detention center to an oncological hospital. In summer 2010, the court terminated the proceedings in his case as the statute of limitations had expired. He was never convicted or acquitted.

The YUKOS case has been one of the most high profile in Russia in recent years. In the early 2000s, the authorities accused the executives of YUKOS, then the country's largest oil company, of economic crimes. YUKOS then went bankrupt while its assets were transferred to Rosneft. Many in the West believe the case was politically driven, but Moscow denies these charges.

In 2005, YUKOS heads Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev were sentenced to eight years in prison for fraud and tax evasion.

In late 2010, a Moscow district court sentenced them to 14 years in prison for oil theft and money laundering. They were expected to be released in 2017, taking into account the time they had already served for their previous convictions from their first trial in 2005. However, on May 24, the Moscow City Court reduced their sentences by one year. They are now scheduled to be released in 2016.