A CONSORTIUM of Dubai-based investors has emerged as the mystery backer of a $10 billion offer to save Yukos, the troubled Russian oil giant.

Members of Dubai’s ruling Maktoum family are believed to have joined a bid fronted by Konstantin Kagalovsky, a former associate of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Yukos’s largest shareholder.

Last month it emerged that Kagalovsky had written to Russian president Vladimir Putin offering to pay Yukos’s outstanding taxes and $800m on behalf of Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev, Yukos’s second- biggest shareholder, for any damages demanded by the state.

The payment would be offered in return for Khodorkovsky’s stake. The back taxes alone could be as much as $10 billion. The bail-out proposal was sent on behalf of a number of unnamed investors.

It is as yet unclear whether Putin has given any thought to the offer, despite Yukos’s increasingly dire situation.

The oil giant, Russia’s biggest oil exporter, has had many of its assets — including bank accounts — frozen, leading to fears that the government could force a sale of the company’s main production subsidiary, Yuganskneftegas, in order to pay the tax bill.

On Friday a Moscow court ruled that any seizing of assets was illegal but Yukos’s mounting problems helped to send the oil price to a record of $44.50 a barrel last week. Traders were worried that supplies from Yukos could be cut off.

The price spike could not have come at a worse time for Britain’s biggest industrial companies.

High oil prices have helped push up the price of other commodities, including electricity and gas — wholesale gas prices are expected to reach record levels this winter. Companies are already being hit with quotes that will add as much as 50% to their energy costs for next year.

Jeremy Nicholson, a director of the Energy Intensive Users Group, said: “There has been a tentative recovery in manufacturing in Britain and this will be threatened by rising production costs if not choked off altogether.”