Judges Read Verdict Faster on 6th Day

By Lyuba Pronina
Staff Writer

Judges in the Mikhail Khodorkovsky trial picked up their snail's-pace reading of the verdict Monday, speeding through up to 150 pages.

Outside the courthouse, a protest by Khodorkovsky's supporters was moved 70 meters down the street to make way for large-scale road repairs, which had sprung up over the weekend.

"If the judges continue at today's pace, I do not rule out that the verdict will be finished by the end of the week," Khodorkovsky's lawyer Genrikh Padva told reporters outside the courthouse.

Padva said that as many as 150 pages were read out Monday, the first full day in six days of reading the verdict, in sharp contrast to about 50 pages in three hours per day last week.

The marathon verdict -- believed to be the longest in the country's post-Soviet history -- has been described as farcical and a Kremlin-inspired effort to string out proceedings so that public interest in the case wanes.

The trial of former Yukos CEO Khodorkovsky and his business partner Platon Lebedev, on charges of fraud, tax evasion and embezzlement has been widely seen as the Kremlin's revenge for Khodorkovsky crossing swords with President Vladimir Putin over business and politics. Prosecutors have demanded the maximum 10 years in prison for both men.

Khodorkovsky's lawyers said that many of the events described by the judges in the verdict had either not taken place or had no relevance to their clients.

From the defendants' cage in the courtroom, Khodorkovsky doodled in a notepad, drawing a series of five-pointed stars and a square, occasionally communicating to his wife, Inna, with gestures. Lebedev exchanged notes with his lawyer Yelena Levina, who later said the notes were comments on the judges' reading of the verdict.

Opposite the courthouse, where last week pro- and anti-Khodorkovsky groups demonstrated, more than 20 pieces of heavy-duty road repair machinery stood. The area was fenced off with crowd barriers and manned by a line of policemen.

The road repairs ironically coincided with Khodorkovsky's supporters being granted permission to demonstrate -- the first day they were allowed to do so since last Monday, when police arrested 28 Khodorkovsky supporters.

"On Friday, I received permission to hold a picket from noon until 3 p.m. with up to 100 people," said Yelena Batenkova, one of the organizers from the Committee for Anti-Military Actions, a group that opposes the war in Chechnya.

"Later that day, the local administration called and said that from Monday there would be road repairs exactly where we had applied to stand," she said. "We will contest this."

Khodorkovsky's supporters held portraits of him and a few signs that read, "Why is Putin only wasting Yukos? Think about it!"

Protesters were holding green and yellow balloons and wearing ribbons in the same Yukos corporate colors. The balloons were later released into the air, in what the protesters said was a symbol of freedom.

A policeman at the scene, Colonel Valery Buyekevich, told Batenkova to ensure her group dispersed by 3:00 p.m. to avoid possible clashes.

The police refused to allow reporters through the barrier to talk to the repairmen.

"Why do you ask me this question? You know why," Buyekevich said, when asked to give a reason. "Ask them when they leave to buy pies."

Opposite the courthouse, more than a dozen workers in bright red overalls were sitting in the shade, taking a break from drilling the pavement.

When asked by a reporter why they were there, a few walked away immediately and one said the work had started Sunday and would go on until at least the end of the week. He said he was unaware of what was going on inside the building across the street.

"As the saying goes, we have two problems in Russia: roads and fools. Well, the fools seem to be sorting out the road, but who will sort them out?" said Ergil Osin, 25, a systems operator who along with his friends was holding red flags that read "Idushchiye Bez Putina," or Moving Without Putin -- the name of the youth movement set up earlier this year in response to pro-Kremlin organization Idushchiye Vmeste, or Moving Together.

An employee reached by telephone at the road repair company AsfaltTsentrStroi on Monday said the company had begun work on May 14 under a contract from the city government. The woman described the job as "a large one," saying she expected it to be completed by Aug. 10.

She was obviously exasperated after receiving calls from several reporters.

"I don't know what all the ruckus is," she said. "We have a job to do."

When asked to give her name, she said 20 journalists had already called her and promptly hung up.

"Each day there is something different," said Robert Amsterdam, a Canadian lawyer on the Khodorkovsky defense team. "Today it happens to be the roads. God only knows what they'll do to us tomorrow: a plague of locusts?"

Lawyers said the verdict was the longest they could remember.

Tamara Morshchakova, an adviser to the Constitutional Court and a former Constitutional Court judge, said that according to Russian court practice no time limits are placed on reading the verdict.

"By law, the judge reads the verdict for as long as the document takes, breaking only to take a rest," Morshchakova said by telephone Monday.

Morshchakova said that Khodorkovsky's verdict was the longest she had heard of, or at least one of the longest.

"They must have had an order," said Igor Mikheyev, one of Khodorkovsky's lawyers, referring to the speeding up of the verdict.


Staff Writers Oksana Yablokova and Carl Schreck contributed to this report.

(The Moscow Times, 5.24.2005)