Khodorkovsky: Were I Not In Jail, It Would Be Harder to Destroy YUKOS

A Moscow court on Monday ruled to keep Mikhail Khodorkovsky in custody for another three months, till Feb. 14. In a statement made during a break in court proceedings the jailed tycoon said the oil company could have been spared had he not been behind bars.

The Meshchansky court on Monday satisfied the request filed by public prosecutor Dmitry Shokhin, who had asked the court to extend the term of detention for Mikhail Khodorkovsky for another three months. Last week the former Yukos CEO marked a year in detention.

The prosecutor told the court he feared that should Khodorkovsky be released, he might flee the country or obstruct proceedings. Shokhin claimed that other people from Khodorkovsky’s “criminal grouping”, who managed to flee, were now exerting pressure on witnesses.

The prosecutor also added that even behind bars Khodorkovsky pressures witnesses.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s defense lawyer, Genrikh Padva, asked the court to postpone proceedings till Tuesday morning so that the defense team could prepare its response to the prosecutor’s request. Instead, the court gave the defense less than three hours to discuss their further actions.

After the break Mikhail Khodorkovsky told the court he was convinced that the real reason why the Prosecutor General’s Office sought to keep him in jail till Feb. 14 was to restrict his influence on the situation surrounding Yukos.

“There is no fear that I would go somewhere,” Khodorkovsky said. “Everybody perfectly understands that I would not leave and would not put pressure on witnesses... It is clear to any unbiased person that were I not in jail it would have been much harder to conduct such a socially dangerous destruction of such a large corporation.

”The main reason [for extending the detention] is that I don’t get in the way,“ he said.

Furthermore, the authorities fear that ”what has remained of the opposition will receive intellectual and administrative support, that would enable it to more effectively challenge the authorities“.

A Tax Ministry official who attended the proceedings supported Shokhin’s request, as the ”accused has failed to cover the damages“ inflicted on the state through tax evasion. Despite objections on the part of Platon Lebedev and the defense, the court prolonged Khodorkovsky’s detention.

The move came as Russian authorities hit Yukos with a battery of fresh tax claims Monday which could see the firm’s total debt soar to an astronomical $17 billion. The fresh complaints against Yukos included charges against the firm as a whole as well as charges against its main production subsidiary, Yuganskneftegas, officials and news reports said.

Monday’s news sent Yukos shares down 11.8 percent on Moscow’s ruble-denominated MICEX exchange. The firm’s market capitalization today is roughly nine billion dollars, a quarter of what it was before Khodorkovsky’s arrest last October and half of its potential final tax bill for 2000-2002.

Khodorkovsky was arrested in Oct. 2003 and is facing 10 years in prison if convicted of seven charges of fraud, tax evasion and embezzlement.

(From Moscow News, 2.11.2004)