FT.com / World - Khodorkovsky still defiant

By Neil Buckley in Chita, Siberia

Published: February 6 2008 22:06 | Last updated: February 6 2008 22:06

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the jailed Russian oligarch, voiced doubts on Wednesday that Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s likely next president, would be able to undo damage to the rule of law inflicted during the Putin era.

In his first face-to-face interview since his arrest in 2003 on fraud charges, Russia’s one-time richest man spoke to the Financial Times about his incarceration, his concerns for his own future and his long-term optimism for Russia.

Speaking in a courtoom in Chita, a Siberian city 6,500km east of Moscow where he is now being held, Mr Khodorkovsky stood inside the metal cage in which Russian defendants are kept in court.

Leaning against the bars, he looked gaunt and drawn on the ninth day of a hunger strike in support of an imprisoned manager of Yukos, the oil company he created.

He answered questions during a 40-minute break in a hearing related to new fraud charges against him.

Mr Khodorkovsky argues that President Vladimir Putin’s regime has used the law to target political enemies, especially business owners like himself. Asked if he thought Mr Medvedev, Mr Putin’s chosen successor as Russian president, could reverse the process, the 44-year-old former oligarch said: “It will be so difficult for him, I can’t even imagine . . . Tradition, and the state of people’s minds, and the lack of forces able to [support] any movement towards the rule of law, everything’s against him. So . . . may God grant him the strength to do it. All we can do is hope.”

The Kremlin insists that it has imposed order after the chaotic 1990s when Mr Khodorkovsky and others made fortunes through acquiring state assets. But Mr Khodorkovsky said that Russia’s biggest problem was the lack of the rule of law which he said was worse than in China. “Laws can be better and they can be worse. But people must abide by laws, and not use them for their own ends.”

However, he said he did not share concerns of some civil society and opposition leaders that democratic freedoms would continue to be eroded in Russia. “People can leave freely, the internet works.” It was just “not possible” that Russia could return to the darkest days of its Soviet past.

He said he believed China’s success with authoritarian capitalism was not a model for Russia. “I’m convinced that Russia is a European country, it’s a country with democratic traditions which more than once have been broken off during its history, but nonetheless there are traditions.”

The businessman was arrested in October 2003 and sentenced in June 2005 to eight years on fraud and tax evasion charges. His energy company, Yukos, which he built into Russia’s biggest after acquiring it in a controversial privatisation in 1995, was sold piecemeal to pay off $28bn back tax charges – with its assets largely gobbled up by Rosneft, the state-owned oil company.

He served the first part of his sentence in a prison colony in Krasnokamensk, a bleak uranium-mining town near the Chinese border, where the man who was once worth $13bn spent his days sewing shirts and gloves. He was moved to the regional capital last year after new charges were brought against him of embezzling more than $30bn in Yukos’ oil sales.

He now spends each day wading through documents for the new trial. If convicted, he now faces up to 22 years in jail.

He is contemptuous of the various legal assaults on Yukos. “The accusations are not connected with a real crime, but with a desire – the desire to take away people’s conscience, the desire to convince a witness to give evidence. It’s all about their various, conflicting desires.”

The Kremlin says all charges brought against Mr Khodorkovsky are legally justified and that he is no political prisoner but a convicted criminal.

But Mr Khodorkovsky’s supporters see him as the victim of a politically motivated response to his own political activities.

Mr Khodorkovsky said he planned to continue his hunger strike until his demands were met for Vasily Aleksanyan, a seriously ill former Yukos vice-president on trial on separate embezzlement charges, to be moved from his Moscow prison to a civilian hospital.

Mr Khodorkovsky said he now accepted calmly the dismemberment of Yukos. “I used up all my nerves in 2004, when a company that was working well was seized and handed over to Rosneft,” he said. “Rosneft today is basically Yukos with a bit added on.”

The former tycoon declined to comment on the conditions in which he was being held, calling them “standard” for Russia. Though he has been held in isolation since declaring his hunger strike.