Lawyers representing Yukos founder Mikhail Khodorkovsky said on Tuesday it is a foregone conclusion their client will be found guilty as judges continued reading the protracted verdict in the controversial trial.
For a third day in a row, the Moscow court’s three-judge panel took turns in reading out the mammoth judgement, which almost word for word repeats the prosecution indictment — clear indication that Khodorkovsky and his business associate Platon Lebedev will be found guilty, the defence says.
“This is not a verdict — it’s frontier justice,” Yury Schmidt, one of Khodorkovsky’s lead lawyers, said. “Our worst expectations have been confirmed. We’ve had no illusions about the verdict since the first day.”
In the first two days of the verdict reading, the court had upheld the prosecution case in all but one charge, which lies outside a 10-year statute of limitations. However, so far the court has formally only declared the two men guilty on one fraud charge, concerning the acquisition of a 44% stake in an agricultural institute.
Defence lawyers say only the harshness of the sentencing remains open to question. Prosecutors have asked for the maximum 10 years jail time for Khodorkovsky (41) and Lebedev (46).
The two men, who deny 11 counts of tax evasion and fraud under seven articles of the Russian criminal code, appeared relaxed inside the defendants’ cage.
Khodorkovsky smiled and looked long into the eyes of his wife, Inna, who sat with his parents in the tiny courtroom. Lebedev was engrossed in a crossword puzzle.
Khodorkovsky was Russia’s richest man when he was arrested by armed police in October 2003 just as he was about to fly in his private jet from a Siberian airport. At the time, his Yukos oil group was considered in the West as Russia’s best-run company.
But he was also increasingly active in politics and it is this, many analysts believe, that made him a target of the Russian authorities.
Following his arrest, Yukos was then brought to its knees by a $28-billion back tax bill, paid partly by the sale of the company’s main production unit, Yuganskneftegas, which in a murky procedure was subsequently acquired by Russian state-owned oil company Rosneft.
The 11-month trial has badly damaged Russia’s image abroad and become a major political issue at home.
The Council of Europe’s pointwoman on the Khodorkovsky case, Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, said Tuesday that “the judgement in this ongoing trial … is a sign of the uncertainty of justice for foreign countries and for investors”.
The most prominent trial since the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, it has stirred political passions and put the spotlight on some of the most contentious issues in Russia, from the murky privatisations of the 1990s to judicial reform and human rights. — AFP