Yukos Lawyer Wants Bush to Intercede

By GERALD NADLER, Associated Press Writer

NEW YORK - A lawyer for the founder of Russia's troubled oil giant Yukos said Friday President Bush could end "this shameful business" and win freedom for Mikhail Khodorkovsky with "a single word" when he meets the Kremlin leader at a summit next week.

In arguably the biggest trial in Russia's post-communist history, Khodorkovsky and his partner Platon Lebedev have been charged with fraud and tax evasion. The trial is nearing an end after dragging on since June 16 in a cramped Moscow courtroom, where Khodorkovsky sits in a cage according to Russian judicial proceedings.

Khodorkovsky, Russia's richest man, was jailed Oct. 25, 2003, after special forces troops surrounded his private jet at an airport in Siberia.

"His case is absolutely hopeless in the Russian judicial system, which is not independent. They are going to find him guilty, although he didn't commit any crime at all," said Karinna Moskalenko, one of Khodorkovsky's lawyers.

Moskalenko and fellow counsel Yuri Schmidt, John Pappalardo and Sanford Saunders said Khodorkovsky was on trial not because of nonpayment of billions of dollars in taxes but because of his perceived political ambitions and funding for opponents of President Vladimir Putin (news - web sites).

Pappalardo, who was a Massachusetts prosecutor for 20 years, said the case against Khodorkovsky and Lebedev was "nothing more than a shameless effort to recast two of Russia's foremost and most successful businessmen and economic reformers as nefarious criminals."

Yuri Schmidt, a lawyer for 40 years in the Soviet Union and Russia, said an initiative from President Bush at his Feb. 24 summit with Putin in Bratislava, Slovakia, could end the case.

"A single word from Bush would be enough to put an end to this shameful business, but I doubt he will raise the subject," Schmidt said at the forum sponsored by the New York University School of Law and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a conservative think tank.

Schmidt said the experience of four decades as an attorney in Russia showed him that the Kremlin understands only force. "Then our heroes turn tail and hide in the bushes," he said, adding the U.S. has shown little initiative in the case and that Bush was not expected to raise the case.

One such threat, others pointed out, would be barring Moscow's hoped for admission to the World Trade Organization (news - web sites) unless the Khodorkovsky case was concluded without punishment for the businessman.

"President Bush should point out to Putin that this has gone on too long , it's gone too far, and if he wants to return Russia to greatness and make it a super power and make it a part of the WTO and a fully functioning member of the global economy, then he should wind this up and get Russia back on the track of the rule of law."

Khodorkovsky has resigned as CEO of the firm he founded, and Yukos has been largely dismantled.

The culmination came Dec. 19, when Yukos unit Yuganskneftegaz, responsible for 60 percent of company's output and 11 percent of Russian oil production, was sold at government auction to an unknown company registered to the address of a bar in a provincial Russian town. The sale price was half of what Yukos and foreign auditors say it was worth. The government said Yukos owed $28 billion in back taxes.

(Associated Press via Yahoo!, 02.20.2005)