Financial Times : Rosneft IPO represents nothing but the syndication of the gulag

From Mr Robert R. Amsterdam.

Sir, I laud the Financial Times for recognising the political, legal and moral questions raised by the Rosneft initial public offering. However, in your editorial "Rosneft: a $20bn offer that can be refused" (April 27), you state that "Mr Khodorkovsky made his fortune through one arbitrary state act - an untransparent privatisation - and lost it in another - a Kremlin-orchestrated tax probe". This oversimplification of the origins of the success of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his oil company obscures the ongoing injustice of his eight-year incarceration in Siberia.

By 2003, Mr Khodorkovsky's company exemplified efficiency, good corporate governance and the promotion of civil society in a country that now sorely lacks any such models. A few years earlier, in the privatisation period, no one thought that Soviet industries were worth much. It would have been hard to convince anyone to invest serious money in Russia at the time. Real money fled real risk. That is all the more reason to recognise the entrepreneurial genius of Mr Khodorkovsky, rather than suggest that the empire he built was some foregone conclusion considering what he started with. The state did not take back what it first gave; it seized billions of dollars of value addedby Mr Khodorkovsky. As if thatwere not enough, the state threwMr Khodorkovsky into a remote Siberian prison in a zone heavily contaminated by life-threatening radioactive waste.

The trial against Mr Khodorkovsky was an absolute sham of selective application of laws that were made to fit the prosecutor's purposes. The courts lacked independence, did not adhere to fundamental legal principles and committed multiple, severe violations of Russian procedural and substantive law. Many of these violations were so grossly erroneous or irrational that they excludedany semblance of good faith fromthe proceedings, and revealed the state's motives: to eliminate Mr Khodorkovsky as a political opponent, and to eliminate Yukos as a competitor to state-owned energy companies. Indeed, the unjust nature of the proceedings, coupled with the politically driven prosecution, qualify Mr Khodorkovsky as a political prisoner under the criteria of the Council of Europe, of which Russia is a member.

For the most part, however, Russia's peers in the international community have shied away from anything more than muted expressions of concern over the Khodorkovsky case. Western leaders must take a realistic and long-term view of the implications of appeasing the Russians on such issues of fundamental human rights and the rule of law. If not, those presently in power in Russia will take a western double-standard as a licence for impunity. To deny, dismiss or discount the gravity of the consequences is to turn a blind eye to the lessons of history.

The Russian authorities' campaign against Mr Khodorkovsky cannot be regarded as a purely internal Russian matter. The campaign has played out in the context of a deepening authoritarianism in Russia that has helped to make energy the new lever of aggressive Russian tendencies abroad. Witness the great hubris on display today as companies such as Gazprom or Transneft baldly threaten Europe in the name of the Russian state.

The Russian political system has mutated rapidly in President Vladimir Putin's second term, jeopardising the protection of human rights and legal guarantees of private property, including foreign investments. The state-sanctioned wrongs committed against Mr Khodorkovsky justify the declaration of a mistrial and his immediate liberation. Against the background of the continued incarceration of Mr Khodorkovsky, the Rosneft IPO represents nothing other than the syndication of the gulag.

Robert R. Amsterdam,

International Defence Attorney for Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky