Former managers with Russia's bankrupt oil giant OAO Yukos have won their bid to take Moscow before Europe's human rights court in a case they say could mean a record claim for damages.
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has agreed to examine the complaints despite Yukos having been dissolved under Russian law, the court said Wednesday.
Welcoming the decision former Yukos chief executive Steven Theede said the complaints were filed "to stand up for the giant losses of our former stakeholders, and this ruling is a major step forward."
The court will hear complaints relating to Russia's investigation of the company for tax fraud between 2000 and 2003.
An ECHR statement recalled that Russian investigators had launched their inquiry after receiving a complaint from Russia's tax ministry.
In May 2004, the authorities ordered Yukos to pay $3.85 billion in back taxes and interest for 2000 alone.
The company eventually ended up being ordered to pay EUR13 billion in back taxes, with interest and fines of another six billion.
But a statement from the former managers of Yukos put the total tax collected from the oil giant as exceeding $34 billion.
They said it could result in the biggest claim ever submitted to any court in the world.
Lawyers for Yukos had argued that the Russian prosecution was riddled with procedural errors and that the estimates made for the tax due between 2000 and 2003 were arbitrary, illegal and disproportionate.
A majority of the ECHR judges rejected the Russian government's call for them not to examine the Yukos complaint because the firm had been wound up in 2007.
"This is an important step towards the vindication of the company's belief in the rule of law, something it never secured in Russia," said Bruce Misamore, former chief financial officer at Yukos, in the ex-managers' statement.
It was the first time the ECHR has reached such a decision for a publicly quoted company, the statement added.
The most famous ex-Yukos chief, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once Russia's richest man, is in a Siberian jail serving an eight-year sentence for fraud and tax evasion in a case that has stirred political controversy.
Russian prosecutors announced on Tuesday he faced fresh charges of embezzlement and illegal financial operations carried out between 1998-2003.
Russia has insisted it is dealing with Khodorkovsky fairly and that he committed financial fraud on a massive scale.
However, right campaigners and some international observers have said the charges against Khodorkovsky were trumped up to punish the one-time billionaire for his opposition to Russia's former president, now prime minister, Vladimir Putin.
"Yukos was the poster child for the business evolution that was taking place in Russia - then politics took over," Theede said in the Yukos managers' statement.
"Yukos' tens of thousands of stakeholders saw the company destroyed and the trust they put into it and Russia taken away with the single swipe of a revengeful political hand."