Police searched the Moscow offices of oil company Russneft and questioned the company's president in connection with an alleged failure to pay taxes, Interfax reported Monday.
The Russian Interior Ministry's Investigative Committee said in a statement that the searches had been conducted after a criminal investigation was opened against the country's seventh-biggest oil company for failure to pay taxes "on an especially huge scale."
Investigators did not specify how much tax money Russneft is suspected of not paying or in what years the taxes were not paid.
The searches were conducted "in the interest of the discovery and strengthening of proof" last Tuesday, and were made public on Monday after the Interior Ministry wrote of them in a press release.
Company president Mikhail Gutseriyev was questioned along with other executives, the ministry added. The ministry did not elaborate whether any charges were being pressed against Gutseriyev or his colleagues.
Fallen oil major Yukos, once Russia's largest producer of the fuel, was brought to its knees after federal prosecutors said it owed over US$25 billion in back taxes.
Assets of the now-bankrupt firm were largely sold off and former CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky is serving an eight-year prison sentence in Eastern Siberia.
Russneft is the country's seventh-largest oil company by market capitalization, worth approximately US$5.6 billion as of late last year.
(Deutsche Press-Agentur-(dpa), 29/01/2007)