Russian Tycoon Is Free, but His Money Is Still Tied Up Sergei Karpukhin/Reuters The Yuganskneftegaz oil processing facility, once the core of the oil company Yukos. Mikhail Khodorkovsky still holds shares. MOSCOW - Before he went to prison 10 years ago, Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky was Russia's richest man, worth maybe $15 billion. Set free this month, he could only guess at his vastly depleted, but still formidable, wealth. "I have no idea about my financial situation," he told journalists in Berlin, where he was whisked on a private plane straight from a Russian penal colony. He was not being coy. As Russian prosecutors began dismantling his company, Mr. Khodorkovsky's lawyers set about safeguarding his main asset, shares in the Yukos oil company. His lawyers did such a good job entangling billions of dollars in offshore vehicles outside of Russia, mostly in the Netherlands, that it is far from clear when or if Mr. Khodorkovsky will ever gain access to what is left of his fortune. The money is now under the control of Dutch foundations, run by boards known by the benign, if Kafkaesque, term of benevolent interveners. There is little doubt that Mr. Khodorkovsky still has tens of millions of dollars in other investments. He is not going to go hungry. In a news conference after his release, he said he had "enough money to make a living." Striking a philosophical note, he also said he was certainly better off than most of his fellow convicts. But that is a pittance compared with what could still be his personal stake in what is left of Yukos, once one of the world's largest oil companies, now bankrupt. There may be as much as $920 million from the sale of the company's overseas assets, but it is locked up in the Dutch foundations. Control of these legal entities, called stichtings in Dutch law, is in the hands of independent boards not beholden even to the beneficiaries, possibly including Mr. Khodorkovsky. The boards are wholly autonomous, run by lawyers and former oil company executives who have found a second career in the corporate afterlife of Yukos. The legal insulation of these foundations means that not only will Mr. Khodorkovsky have to wait before seeing any proceeds, but he cannot offer assurances to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia or anyone else about how this legal process will unfold. Looming in the future is the possibility of protracted legal battles with Russia and the Russian state oil company Rosneft. "This happened a year and a half after Khodorkovsky was arrested, and he didn't have a hand in it and didn't even know about it," said Bruce K. Misamore, the former chief financial officer for Yukos. We've been fighting to protect those assets for eventual distribution to shareholders of Yukos. He and others emphasized those shareholders also included pension and mutual funds that invested in Yukos. "We will disburse the funds at the first opportunity," Mr. Misamore said, but that could be many years from now because of pending lawsuits. Without the efforts of the benevolent interveners, all the shareholders including Mr. Khodorkovsky would most likely have been wiped out, fully absorbed into Rosneft. While they have a fiduciary responsibility to move as quickly as possible, the legal process has been slow. A lawsuit to recoup $100 billion from the bankruptcy of Yukos in the European Court of Human Rights dragged on for seven years, ending inconclusively. A new suit filed in May by the benevolent interveners could last as long. Cases are also pending in Britain and the Netherlands. The five trustees on each board of the two foundations and their lawyers, deduct "a few million" a year for legal fees and for a "market-based compensation" as directors, Mr. Misamore said. After his release, Mr. Khodorkovsky told interviewers in Germany that he had offered President Putin assurances in a letter that he would not participate in politics and not seek to regain his shares of Yukos, though the details were unclear. Switzerland has granted Mr. Khodorkovsky a three-month visa. What is clear is that the lawyers now controlling Yukos's legacy assets made no such promise.