Yukos chief returns to court
Yukos tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky returns to court for a fourth day for the gruelling reading of the verdict in his fraud case today, with his frustrated lawyers speculating that the numbing pace is aimed at killing interest in the biggest trial in post-Soviet Russia.
Judge Irina Kolesnikova has already said that Khodorkovsky and co-defendant Platon Lebedev committed tax evasion, fraud and embezzlement, but has yet to formally state their guilt.
When that statement might come was unclear. The verdict documents are being read aloud, as Russian law requires, and after three days the judge still had a thick stack of papers to go through.
“It’s glacial,” fumed Robert Amsterdam, a Canadian lawyer on the defence team, who said he believed the pace was a clear effort at exhausting the public’s attention span.
The case against Khodorkovsky and Lebedev is founded on the claim that the pair acted as part of an “organised criminal group” to commit economic crimes as the country wrenched itself out of Soviet ways, but many observers see the case as Kremlin retaliation for Khodorkovsky’s political activities.
The defence contends the prosecution has failed to prove that such a group exists or show that Khodorkovsky’s and Lebedev’s actions were illegal under the laws of the economically chaotic 1990s.
“The country was moving towards a market economy. There were many contradictions,” defence lawyer Yuri Schmidt said, according to Russian news agencies.
“All these events took place according to the laws in effect at the time. Then the laws changed, and now different laws are in effect.”
Prosecutors have asked that the two be given the maximum sentence of 10 years.
Observers say the trial and separate carve-up of Khodorkovsky’s Yukos oil empire against a disputed €21.8bn back taxes bill were triggered when the billionaire funded opposition parties in 2003 – breaking the Kremlin’s unwritten rule that powerful business “oligarchs” must stay out of politics.
“This is not a trial, but a settling of scores,” Schmidt said.
A central charge focusing on the allegedly rigged privatisation of a fertiliser component-maker appears to have been dropped.
But Yevgeny Yasin, a prominent economics expert, said Khodorkovsky was unlikely to be let free, especially as prosecutors have said new charges against him on money-laundering are pending.
“From my point of view, Khodorkovsky won’t be let out before the presidential elections (in 2008),” he said on Ekho Moskvy radio.
“Even if Judge Kolesnikova gave an acquittal or a conditional sentence, then they would immediately present new charges.”
At the Moscow court yesterday, police patrolled the streets with attack dogs, while journalists and television crews were crammed into a fenced-off zone in the forecourt as scores of police lined the pavements.
As is rapidly becoming routine, a group of about 100 anti-Khodorkovsky demonstrators gathered silently opposite.
“Khodorkovsky: Repent and live with a clear conscience,” read one of their signs.
Inside the yellow, three-storey courthouse, Kolesnikova alternated with her two deputies in reading through a laborious summation of the court’s assessment of arguments by the prosecution and defence. The final statement on guilt will be made only at the end of the review of both side’s cases.
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