Top Yukos Shareholder Lebedev Pleads Not Guilty

Former Menatep Bank head and top Yukos shareholder Platon Lebedev pleaded not guilty on Monday to charges of fraud and tax evasion, after his partner, Yukos founder Mikhail Khodorkovsky, did the same on Friday.

Testifying at a court hearing in Moscow’s Meschansky Court House on Monday, the jailed shareholder denied all charges.

“To my shame, I was unable to understand what exactly my crime consisted of,” the Newsru.com news site quoted Lebedev as saying.

“The conclusions drawn by the prosecutor general are not true, are not based on law and evidence, and are deliberately false,” he said.
He added, meanwhile, that the court faces a “unsolvable challenge”.

On Friday Khodorkovsky likewise called allegations against him fiction. “I categorically object to the attempts to picture normal production activity as criminal fiction, and to the conjectures the indictment act is filled with,” he said.

(From MosNews, 02.28.2005)