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Yuri Gripas / Reuters
Kudrin preparing to speak at the Peterson Institute in Washington on Friday, shortly after being served a summons.
"An unidentified person foisted some papers whose contents were unknown on the minister," his spokesman Pavel Kuznetsov said Saturday, Interfax reported.
The papers later turned out to be a notice from the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Kuznetsov said. The federal court had summoned Kudrin to give evidence in the trial of former Yukos chief Mikhail Khodorkovsky that is taking place in a Russian court, Kuznetsov said.
It remained unclear Sunday why a U.S. court was involved in a Russian trial. Some news outlets reported that the summons were on behalf of 12 American minority shareholders in Yukos who are seeking compensation for the bankruptcy.
A man in sunglasses walked over to Kudrin as the minister shook hands and exchanged greetings with C. Fred Bergsten, director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, at the entrance to the research institute, television footage showed. The man handed some folded papers to Kudrin, who barely gave them a look as he accepted them, continuing to talk to Bergsten, according to the footage filmed by the international Russian-language channel RTVi.
Kudrin's subsequent speech at the private institute — on the Russian government's anti-crisis measures — was part of a visit to Washington for a meeting of G20 finance ministers.
Khodorkovsky's lawyers prepared the court notice "in an extremely compressed amount of time and in a secret way," Kuznetsov said.
U.S. lawyers from the Baker Botts law firm, which Russia hired for legal advice on the matter, said a U.S. court could still dismiss the notice, Kuznetsov said.
But Khodorkovsky's two key lawyers, Vadim Klyuvgant and Karina Moskalenko, said they did not know where the notice had come from.
"Everything that I know is from the mass media," Klyuvgant said Sunday.
Khodorkovsky has asked that Kudrin and other senior government officials testify at his trial in Moscow's Khamovnichesky District Court, where he is being tried on charges of embezzlement and money laundering. Once the biggest Russian oil company, Yukos went bankrupt after being hit by massive back tax claims. Its assets changed hands in a series of auctions and were snapped up mostly by state-controlled Rosneft.
Khodorkovsky is already serving an eight-year prison term for tax evasion and fraud.
Kudrin was finance minister as Yukos collapsed.
Radio Liberty reported that Friday's summons were for Kudrin to testify in a court case that 12 U.S. holders of Yukos' American Depository Receipts filed against the Russian government in October 2005, demanding $9 million in compensation for bringing the company to bankruptcy.
Kudrin was first served a notice to appear in court as a witness in that case in January 2006. Court marshal David Felter delivered the notice when Kudrin headed for a meeting with then-U.S. Finance Secretary John Snow, Thomas Johnson Jr., a lawyer at Covington and Burling representing the complainants, said at the time.
Kudrin denied being served at the time.
RTVi identified the man who handed Kudrin his notice Friday as David Felter.
In other news, Kudrin blamed developed countries for resisting the reform of the International Monetary Fund after a meeting dedicated to the institution.
"We already meet cool attitude and even resistance [to reform plans]," Kudrin told reporters Sunday in Washington. "The leading countries are not in a hurry. … This was the main discussion, the nerve of the IMF meeting."
Kudrin said Russia was ready to invest some of its $385 billion forex reserves — the world's third largest — in IMF securities but needed to make sure that they were liquid enough for Russia to get its money back quickly.
During the Peterson institute speech, which was attended by economists and financiers such as George Soros, Kudrin said the government would give banks more funds if their nonperforming loans exceeded 10 percent of the total. He also warned that the budget deficit might grow higher than the estimate of 8 percent of the gross domestic product.
One of the attendees, Russia analyst Andrew Kuchins, said he was glad that Kudrin didn't look stressed at the event — an apparent reference to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's remark last week that Kudrin was stressed.
Kudrin said at a recent meeting that external conditions, such as oil prices, have been extremely favorable for the Russian economy but would not be the same in the next 10 to 50 years. But some news outlets misquoted him as saying that Russia wouldn't recover from the crisis for 50 years, prompting Putin to retort at a separate meeting that the finance minister was "stressed" when he had said that.
