By James Schofield in Moscow

A minority shareholder in Russia's state controlled gas behemoth Gazprom has launched a series of legal actions against PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), the energy giant's auditor, "to officially expose as false and misleading" audit conclusions reached last year.

"By launching the lawsuits against PwC, we want to show auditors that there are rules and laws in Russia, and those who choose to violate them will face serious consequences," said William Browder, chief executive of Hermitage Capital Management Fund, which is bringing the case.

Alexander Dobrovinsky, Mr Browder's lawyer, described the case as "a black-and-white case of a false audit report."

"PwC presented audit reports that contradicted the facts they had available to them," he said in a statement.

No comment

PricewaterhouseCoopers declined to comment in detail until their lawyers have had time to analyse the lawsuit.

"We have not seen the lawsuit and therefore we cannot comment in detail on whatever may be contained in it," said Richard Buski, managing partner of PwC in Moscow.

"We stand behind all our audits of Gazprom and will continue to do so in the future," he said.

Hermitage has also filed a separate appeal with Russian Ministry of Finance to suspend PwC's auditing licence in Russia.

'Dodgy' dealings

To support the lawsuits, Hermitage points to a number of transactions that it claims were of a non-commercial nature between Gazprom and Russian gas company Itera.

"I'm not making any specific allegations about who siphoned assets, what I am saying is that assets were taken out of Gazprom for a negligible amount of money and it would seem odd for a company acting in its own interest to lose its assets for no money," Mr Browder said.

The press release comments that despite evidence used in the compilation of the PwC audit reports, the transactions were "not adequately or objectively" represented in the auditors' conclusions.

"PwC had two jobs, the first to look at the relationship between Gazprom and Itera and comment if there was anything odd about it. Secondly all of these dubious transactions took place while they were auditors of Gazprom," Mr Browder said.

"They had huge incentives to co-operate with the management as say everything was okay and no disincentives to in the form of lawsuits and regulations for them not to."

Mr Browder argued that these transactions "led to billions of dollars of losses for Gazprom and resulted in Gazprom shares being deeply depressed over a long period of time."