Khodorkovsky Might Get Lesser Time

In the fourth day of the sentence reading of the former head of YUKOS, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and former head of MENATEP, Platon Lebedev, the court changed the lowest possible jail term for both defendants from five to four years.

The familiar scene on Kalanchevskaya Street featured the tight police cordon on both sides of the street, gloomy faces of multiple special police and military units and a double row of metal tourniquets. The police were supposed to hold the waves of journalists and people wearing red T-shirts emblazoned with Freedom to MBK (freedom to Mikhail Borisovich Khodorkovsky) and pins "Khodorkovsky, go home!" from going into the court building. The soldiers were wearing bullet-proof vests. The police with the Rottweilers and German Shepherds were patrolling inside the tourniquets. On the other side of the court there were groups of people from Mosfilm movie studio which were holding professionally made posters "Khodorkovsky, pay taxes and take a rest in jail."
In the mean time, there were fewer attorneys and relatives of the defendants inside of the court building on the fourth day of the sentence reading. The famous defense lawyers Genrikh Padva and Yuri Shmidt did not showed up and said that they were not feeling well. And Lebedev's, attorney Elena Liptser, had to take their places. She said that the court was working for half hour longer than in previous days. However, the sentencing did get stuck on the charge of large-scale fraud of 44 percent of the Scientific Research Institute of Fertilizers and Insecto-Fungicides (SRIFI). "The sentencing papers pile on the judges table that were already read had height of three centimeters and the pile that wasn't even touched yet --about 15 centimeters," Liptser described to Kommersant.

Yesterday the court was naming the documents that were consideed as an evidence of the defendants’ non-compliance to the court order to return 44 percent of the SRIFI stock back to the state. In the mean time, one of the Khodorkovsky attorneys, Igor Mikheev, told Kommersant that there was no court order to return the stocks to the state. On November 24, 1997, the arbitrage court of Moscow decided to break the sale agreement for 44 percent of SRIFI shares between the Russian Fund of Federal Property (RFFP) and Wallton Company, whose guarantor was MENATEP. The demand to return the stocks to state possession did not exist in the RFFP court request, and because of that the arbitrage court had no right to order to Wallton to return the shares back to state. The question of RFFP paying money to Wallton for the stocks and the company returns the shares to the Fund could be the resolved by court if the RFFP would make such request. However, the Fund never made such request. It was not a coincidence that Salavat Karimov, investigator of the Prosecutor General office, wrote in the charges to Khodorkovsky, which the oligarch was trying "not to allow future loss of the shares in the court."

Yesterday the court changed the charges for defendants who trying to obtain the possession of the SRIFI stock from Article 159 of Criminal Code (CC) to Article 147 of CC, that was active before 1996. Both articles describe the punishment for large group fraud. Article 159 provides prison sentence from five years to ten years maximum; Article 149 says from four to ten years. Thus, the lower prison sentence limit was dropped one notch. However, it will not make a big difference because the total prison sentence is based on the partial addition of all articles of CC incriminated to the defendant.

After yesterday’s court session, attorneys gave journalists the first comment from Lebedev: "The witnesses’ testimonies are distorted. The sentencing contained witnesses’ testimonies that they never gave in court." The Canadian lawyer of Khodorkovsky, Robert Amsterdam, who was present during the sentence reading, added: "The court didn't take into consideration the testimonies of the defendants. It was only accepting the facts from the prosecution." Elena, first wife of Khodorkovsky and mother of his adult son, was trying to show the court atmosphere: "The court read the sentence fast and unclear. I wish the judges would respect just a little bit the audience. It's all complete delirium. Unfortunately it is not a dream but reality. All we have left is waiting the end of the sentencing." Kommersant will be monitoring the further sentencing.

by Ekaterina Zapodinskaya

(Kommersant, 5.20.2005)