Ex-official backs Yukos founder in court

A former Russian regional governor testified that Mikhail Khodorkovsky and oil giant Yukos broke no laws in acquiring a local firm during the country's freewheeling 1990s privatisation process.

"There were no violations of the privatisation process," Yevgeny Komorov, former governor of Russia's northern Murmansk region, testified before a three-judge panel hearing the trial of Khodorkovsky, the jailed Yukos founder.

"Everything was done in accordance with the law," he said, referring to Khodorkovsky's 1994 purchase through a Yukos subsidiary of a 20-percent stake in a fertilizer production company, a transaction at the centre of the state's case.

Komorov was the second witness in as many days to testify in support of Khodorkovsky's claim that he is not guilty of tax evasion and accounting fraud charges brought by Russian government prosecutors against him.

On Monday, the former chief executive of the fertilizer company provided similar testimony and said he was never misled by Khodorkovsky or his co-defendant, Platon Lebedev, in their purchase of the shares as the company was privatized.

Khodorkovsky, dressed in blue jeans and a polo shirt and appearing relaxed as he observed the court proceedings from inside a steel cage, sarcastically criticized prosecutors for asking leading, repetitive and irrelevant questions.

"I have the feeling, though perhaps I am mistaken, that the prosecution is trying to break down a door that is already open," the 41-year-old Khodorkovsky said, provoking hushed chuckles from several spectators in the courtroom.

There were reports in some Russian media that Khodorkovsky would deliver full-fledged testimony in his own defence during the session Tuesday, but he said he would not speak at length in the trial until all of the witnesses had been heard.

Khodorkovsky, technically still Russia's wealthiest individual, faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted.

In Russia, observers of the trial are split. Some regard it as a Kremlin-inspired personal vendetta in response to Khodorkovsky's funding of groups opposed to President Vladimir Putin.

Others say his amassing of billions of dollars in personal wealth over a period of a few years in the mid-1990s was both illegal and an immoral exploitation of the economic chaos in Russia in the immediate wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

HERE