Russia's oil giant Yukos, teetering on the verge of bankruptcy due to a huge back taxes bill, keeps supplying oil to China as usual, a Yukos officer said Friday.

"We are shipping oil under contracts," Sergei Prisyazhnyuk, director of Yukos' Beijing office, was cited by Interfax news agency as saying.

The remarks came after Yukos chief executive officer Steven Theede warned here Tuesday that Yukos, the largest oil exporter in Russia, might reduce its oil production due to the back tax demands of 3.4 billion US dollars against it.

Prisyazhnyuk confirmed that Yukos will continue to deliver oil to China till the end of August, and the volume of monthly oil shipments to China has remained unchanged at 420,000 tons to the China National Petroleum Corporation and 250,000 tons to Sinopec Group.

He added that oil transportation to China is underway.

Yukos has warned that the underpaid debt for the year 2000 charged by the Russian tax authorities would drive it into bankruptcy because it could not raise enough cash for the payment after its assets were frozen by an earlier court order.

The Justice Ministry bailiffs have so far collected 9.9 billion rubles (340 million dollars) as payment of the tax bill, chief court bailiff Arkady Melnikov said Friday.

The company has been trying to seek compromise with the Russian authorities by restructuring its tax debt and preventing the confiscation of its assets, but no official response has been made.

Critics see the one-year legal investigation in Yukos as a Kremlin-initiated onslaught against the company's former chief executive Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who has reportedly sponsored opponents against Russian President Vladimir Putin.