American investors who once held stock in Yukos have one final legal step to pursue before being forced to abandon their demands for compensation from the Kremlin.

This week the US District Court of Columbia said that Russia enjoyed sovereign immunity and therefore could not be tried in an American court.

American shareholders in Yukos claim that the Russian oil company was stolen from them by the Kremlin when, they allege, it issued unlawful tax demands that forced the group into insolvency and jailed its chief executive for tax evasion.

The Kremlin has been accused of drumming up unlawful tax claims against Yukos, revoking oil licences and forcing the oil group into insolvency as part of a politically motivated attack on Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the company’s former owner.

Yukos was forced to sell Yugans-kneftegas, which accounted for more than half Yukos’s oil production, for a price that some shareholders claimed was at a 30 per cent discount to its market value, to Rosneft, the state-controlled oil group.

The 40 investors, who are seeking compensation of about $12 million (£5.8 million), held American depositary receipts in Yukos, which were traded on Wall Street. Those investors form part of a wider community of American institutional shareholders who held around $7 billion of Yukos stock. The investor group is considering whether to appeal against the ruling. Such an appeal would mark the end of the legal journey in the United States for the investors. Thomas Johnson, a partner at the American law firm Covington & Burling, who represents the 40 investors, said: “We have run out of legal remedy. The only remedy left is for the US Government to take diplomatic action on behalf of its nationals.”

European countries, including Britain, have signed bilateral investment treaties with Russia that allow aggrieved investors to be heard in an arbitration court, whose rulings are binding. America has no such treaty with Russia.

American former shareholders in Yukos are hopeful that Washington may be able to extract a lump sum from Russia as compensation, mimicking a move in the 1920s after a number of Americans lost property that they owned in Russia during the Russian Revolution.

Mr Johnson added: “All that is left is the old-fashioned government-to-government way. Russia nationalised Yukos and gave its shareholders no compensation. They stole this company. They can’t do that.”

Former shareholders in Yukos in Britain had also chased compensation and sought to block the break-up of the oil group.

Last year, a group of Yukos investors tried to block the flotation of Rosneft in London, claiming that Rosneft had illegally bought Yukos assets. Those claims were thrown out by the High Court in London.

Yukos, once Russia’s largest oil company, was declared bankrupt in August last year, after three years of litigation with tax authorities over tax arrears. Khodorkovsky, an opponent of President Putin, is serving an eight-year prison sentence in Siberia for fraud and tax evasion.

This month the Moscow Arbitration Court completed the Yukos liquidation process at the request of the bankruptcy administrator. The company was struck off the register of legal entities last Wednesday.

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