Khodorkovsky Gets 9-Year Sentence

MOSCOW – Bringing an end to the most closely watched and politically charged criminal trial in Russia’s post-Soviet history, a Moscow court yesterday sentenced former oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky to nine years in prison and ordered him to pay vast sums in taxes and fines.During a Washington press conference, President Bush expressed some concern over the handling of the case.The court found Mr. Khodorkovsky, 41, guilty of six of seven charges of fraud and tax evasion. The sentence, one year short of the maximum demanded by prosecutors, will be reduced by the 583 days he has already spent in jail since being snatched from his private jet by special forces in October 2003.The verdict had long been seen as a foregone conclusion, with critics charging that the Kremlin orchestrated the case in order to destroy one of President Putin’s political rivals and seize control of Mr. Khodorkovsky’s oil firm, Yukos.“Judicial power in Russia has been turned into a dumb appendage, a blunt weapon of the authorities,” Mr. Khodorkovsky, once Russia’s richest man, said in a statement read to reporters by his lawyer. “The verdict in my trial was destined to be decided in the Kremlin.”A Canadian lawyer on the defense team, Robert Amsterdam, vowed to fight the conviction “by any means necessary.”“He is a political prisoner, a victim of a sick, corrupt regime, and in time he will be exonerated and honored for his achievements,” Mr. Amsterdam said.Mr. Khodorkovsky’s co-defendant and business associate, Platon Lebedev, was found guilty of the same charges and given the same sentence.The two men were also ordered to pay more than $614 million in taxes and penalties owed by companies with which they were involved. Mr. Khodorkovsky was additionally ordered to pay $42.5 million in income taxes and Mr. Lebedev to pay $581,000.Lawyers for both men plan to appeal the verdict in the 10-day period allotted under Russian law.Prosecutors, who have already said they plan to file more charges against Mr. Khodorkovsky, praised the verdict.“This is a grave crime and the culprits received fair punishment for it,” a spokeswoman for the prosecutor general’s office, Natalya Vishnyakova, said. “We categorically deny any political lining to this case. … They embezzled astronomical sums, shamelessly robbing the state and the people.”It took the court a record 12 days to read out the verdict in the 11-month trial – a delay the defense said was a ploy designed to sap interest in the case.Mr. Khodorkovsky’s mother, Marina, said the verdict was certain in country ruled by Mr. Putin, a Soviet-era KGB agent.“We lost our son on the day when Putin came to power,” she said. “We are old people, and we know from our own experience who they are, these KGB people.”The trial has raised alarm in the West about the decline of democracy in Russia and the high risk of doing business there. Throughout the trial, Mr. Khodorkovsky watched from behind bars as the government crushed Yukos – once Russia’s largest oil firm and most profitable company – under the weight of enormous back-tax claims. State firms eventually snapped up Yukos’s core assets in auctions widely criticized as Kremlin-rigged.Yukos announced shortly after the verdict that it had filed a court challenge seeking $11.6 billion in damages from the Russian government.Speaking to reporters in Washington, Mr. Bush said yesterday that he had personally “expressed my concerns about the case” with Mr. Putin.“As I explained to him, here you’re innocent until proven guilty, and it appeared to us – at least people in my administration – that it looked like he had been judged guilty prior to [having] a fair trial,” Mr. Bush said. He said America is “watching the ongoing case” and now wants to see “how the appeal will be handled.”Western sympathy for Mr. Khodorkovsky, whose fortune was once estimated at $15 billion, is hardly echoed among ordinary Russians, most of whom view Russia’s wealthy oligarchs as robber barons. Mr. Khodorkovsky was among the handful of well-connected businessmen who seized control of vast swathes of the Russian economy in the 1990s under dubious privatization schemes that left millions of Russians penniless.

Khodorkovsky Gets 9-Year Sentence

Khodorkovsky Gets 9-Year Sentence

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