Mikhail Khodorkovsky Society

FT.com / World - Khodorkovsky still defiant

2008-02-07T00:57:00.000Z

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.

FT.com / World - Unbowed in face of ‘absurd’ charges

2008-02-07T00:53:00.000Z

By Neil Buckley

Published: February 6 2008 22:03 | Last updated: February 6 2008 22:03

Gaunt, a little jaundiced, his hair greyer and sparser than when he was last seen in Moscow at his sentencing three years ago, Mikhail Khodorkovsky stood defiantly in a Siberian courtroom on Wednesday despite being on the ninth day of a hunger strike.

He had been brought from a pre-trial detention centre in Chita, a city 6,500km east of Moscow, to a nearby court for a hearing relating to embezzlement charges brought against him last year.

During a long break, Mr Khodorkovsky answered questions from the Financial Times and a scattering of his supporters, speaking through the beige-painted bars of the cage in which Russian courts house criminal defendants.

His voice fading occasionally, prompting him to gulp water from a bottle, Mr Khodorkovsky spoke of his concerns for himself, his family and Russia.

Asked about his health after several days on a “dry” hunger strike before he decided to accept water, he twice insisted he was normalno, the shrugging Russian equivalent of OK.

Mr Khodorkovsky said he planned to continue his hunger strike until his demands were met for Vasily Aleksanyan, one of his former senior managers at the Yukos energy group who is now on trial on separate embezzlement charges, to be moved from his Moscow prison to a civilian hospital.

Mr Aleksanyan has been diagnosed with Aids, cancer of the lymph glands, suspected tuberculosis, and is nearly blind. He has accused prosecutors of trying to force him to give false testimony against Mr Khodorkovsky in return for medical treatment.

“What other way was there?” Mr Khodorkovsky said on Wednesday of his decision to stop accepting food last week in support of Mr Aleksanyan. “My health is OK. I’m fully ready for a long bureaucratic procedure while they check Aleksanyan’s health.”

Mr Khodorkovsky was initially on a “dry” hunger strike but decided at the weekend to start accepting water after Mr Aleksanyan said his prison conditions had been improved.

A Moscow court on Wednesday suspended Mr Aleksanyan’s trial but said he would not be released from prison. The court said he should receive treatment in the prison hospital, but Mr Aleksanyan’s lawyers say the prison is unable to provide adequate conditions for the treatment he needs. Even the head of the prison wrote to the court saying he needed to be moved for special treatment.

Looking generally relaxed in the Chita court, the former business oligarch said the $28bn (€19bn, £14bn) embezzlement charges against him were so absurd it was difficult to mount an effective defence.

“I’m being accused of stealing all the oil produced by Yukos over six years. It will be interesting to see how they intend to prove that,” he said.

He admitted that when he arrived in Krasnokamensk prison after his sentencing he had been an object of curiosity. But he said inmates and local people had treated him better than Muscovites.

“Here the word ‘conscience’ has not yet disappeared,” he said. “Of course, to a certain extent, I am a being from another world, an alien [to other prisoners],” he said. “[I told them] ‘So you didn’t have a political prisoner here before? Well, now you have one. They were around before. Get used to that situation.’ ”

Mr Khodorkovsky was refused an application when in Krasnokamensk to teach mathematics to other inmates but, along with other prisoners, sewed shirts and gloves.

His arrival did seem to raise other prisoners’ awareness of their rights.

“I don’t think that I was responsible. But people understood that they could defend their rights by legal means. Previously, when there was a problem, there were protests etc. But when I came to the colony, the situation changed, in that commissions started to arrive constantly, and the prosecutor came.

“And the first time the prosecutor came, one person went to see him, and only to talk about his case, not about his imprisonment. And everyone looked at him like he was nuts.

“The second time the prosecutor came, there was a whole queue waiting for him, 40 people. So to a significant degree, life started to change.”

Since his transfer to Chita, a city of stolid Soviet-era architecture on the transSiberian railway where morning temperatures this week have been about -28°C, he has been reading 200 pages of documents a day to prepare for his new trial.

The former tycoon declined to comment on suggestions that he had embraced the Russian Orthodox faith.

“That’s a complicated question. I have thought a lot about this. And I’d rather keep it to myself.”

Mr Khodorkovsky said he worried most about his parents. “What’s important is how my parents feel, the rest is not important.”

The former head of the stricken oil group argued that Dmitry Medvedev, Vladimir Putin’s likely successor as president following elections next month, would face huge challenges restoring the rule of law in Russia. But he said that, despite the erosion of democracy, he was broadly optimistic about the country’s future.

“It’s a question of my personality. I can’t provide a lot of arguments for and against but, on the whole, I’m optimistic.”

Mr Khodorkovsky said China’s success with authoritarian capitalism was not a model for Russia. “Here in Chita ... if you ask people ‘Are you more like a Chinese person, or more like a European?’ Here I think people’s understanding is fairly unambiguous. We’re a European country. That’s how we developed. And the way forward for us is the European way.”

FT.com / Home UK / UK - Transcript of Khodorkovsky interview highlights

2008-02-07T00:51:00.000Z

Published: February 6 2008 22:03 | Last updated: February 6 2008 22:03

Partial transcript of the FT’s interview with Mikhail Khodorkovsky, conducted by Neil Buckley in Chita regional court, Chita, Siberia. 6 February 2008

Financial Times: How long will you continue your hunger strike?

Mikhail Khodorkovsky: I said I would continue my hunger strike until the question is settled about an independent inspection into the conditions [of Vasily Aleksanyan] and whether he can be treated in the detention centre. And according to the results of that commission, some kind of action should be taken.

That’s what I’m saying. As far as I know, Russia’s human rights ombudsman Lukin he announced the same demands to the prosecutor

FT: You went from a dry hunger strike to accepting water because Aleksanyan’s conditions had been improved?

MK: He said that they had been, and we can only judge by what he said. Only by what he told the media, that the conditions of his imprisonment had radically improved.

FT: How is your health?

MK: I’m OK. I think I’m fully ready for a long bureaucratic procedure while they check the health of Aleksanyan. But as long as our bureaucrats drag out that procedure, I’m ready to continue.

FT: Why did you decide there was no other option than a hunger strike?

MK: What other way was there? Aleksanyan himself announced that the director of the investigative group had demanded false evidence from him against me, and made a direct link between him giving this false evidence in exchange for allowing him treatment. Alexanyan refused, and they are not providing treatment. He announced this in the supreme court of Russia. What can I do in that situation?

FT: What conditions are you held in? How many people in your cell?

MK: Under Russian law, if a person announces a hunger strike he’s held in isolation. Before that, there were two or three other people in the cell. I don’t really have any problem with the conditions of my imprisonment. For our country, they’re the norm.

FT: But the reputation of this detention centre is very poor.

MK: I can’t really get into discussions about that. But my conditions are standard, they meet the usual norms for Russia.

FT: What does your family think about your hunger strike?

MK: What’s important is how my parents feel, the rest is not important. I’ve been thinking most of all about my parents. My wife understands me, so she doesn’t question what I’m doing. She’s already been through a lot.

FT: Are you able to continue familiarising yourself with the material for the new trial?

MK: I’m still able to read 200 pages a day. The only really problem I have is with speaking, when my throat is dry.

FT: Some people say fear is returning to Russia, that things could go back to the Soviet era…

MK: I hope that that won’t happen. We need to be ready for the best…I don’t think it will happen. People can leave freely, the internet works. It’s just not possible.

FT: But the Federation Council will examine a law on internet this week?

MK: That’s just not possible. Everyone clearly understands that innovation is important, we won’t be able to survive without innovative technology.

FT: But does the government understand that?

MK: The government understands it very well. Even the oil industry can’t work properly without innovation. There can be situations where it’s very difficult to develop an oil well. Without innovation you can’t do it.

FT: But in China, there’s less democracy than here, but economy is developing.

MK: There are two important differences. First, I read an article by [Andrei] Illarionov [former economic adviser to Vladimir Putin]. Very interesting. He said three countries are considered examples of how authoritarian political regimes can develop their economies – China, South Korea and Singapore. How do these 3 countries differ from Russia? It’s very interesting. Singapore is number one by the state of its judiciary. South Korea is at a very high level, and even China is better than Russia. That’s the basic difference. The presence of the rule of law. If there is the rule of law, the level of authoritarianism of the executive branch is limited.

Another reason why we can’t take China as an example is because we’re a country where competition of ideas is important. The west is accustomed to competition in the political sphere, competition between parties. In China there is also an important kind of pluralism, but it is territorial. There is a Beijing party organisation, a Shanghai party organisation, which wield very serious economic and political power, and in the competition between the three possible systems, they are able to work out some kind of consensus opinion among the elite. So there is a kind of pluralism. It’s just different from the west and the west doesn’t understand it.

For Russia, the Chinese route is impossible because for us territorial pluralism could lead to the collapse of the country, and we can’t afford that. So accordingly, only a more standard form of pluralism is possible for us.

And to take the city state of Singapore as an example for Russia is not possible.

FT: So Russia’s biggest problem is the lack of an independent legal system?

MK: The lack of the rule of law, as a whole. Laws can be better and they can be worse. But people must abide by laws, and not use them for their own ends.

FT: Do you think Medvedev believes in the rule of law? When he becomes president is some kind of change possible?

MK: It’s very difficult for me to predict, because it will be so difficult for him. I can’t even imagine. Honestly speaking, if you asked me how to get Russia out of this situation, I would be utterly lost. 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.”

FT: But you still have an optimistic view on the future of Russia?

MK :Broadly, yes. But that’s a question of my personality. I can’t provide a lot of arguments for and against, but on the whole I’m optimistic.

FT: Has your view on the future of Russia changed during your imprisonment?

MK: You know, I ended up in prison at a fairly mature age to be able to seriously change one’s views. 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. People are educated, they’re absolutely normal. You wouldn’t believe the extent to which I was able to speak in the same language - I’m a Muscovite, with a relatively high level, by our standards, of education - the extent to which I was able to speak the same language to people who live deep in the Chita region, who have only school-level education. We’re people of one culture, one understanding of the world. …Here in Chita, to say Russia is an Asian country, I think for many people that would be, well, I wouldn’t say an insult, but if you ask people are you more like a Chinese person, or more like a European, here I think the people’s understanding is fairly unambiguous. We’re a European country. That’s how we developed. And the way forward for us is the European way.

FT: How do other prisoners treat you?

MK: I, of course, to a certain extent am a being from another world, an alien, and in the camps it’s the tradition to rank people on a kind of scale. I said to them, So didn’t have a political prisoner before? Well now you have one. They were around before. Get used to that situation. Bring in new ranks.

FT: Was it true you were given the nickname “clever”?

MK: No, that wasn’t the case...Young people have nicknames, but not the older ones. For me, for example, it’s usual to refer to people by their name and patronymic, or by the patronymic, so people referred to me as Borisovich. It’s not unique, it’s a relatively accepted situation.

FT: Perhaps how they referred to you between themselves?

MK: Maybe, but it’s not important.

FT: What’s your attitude to what happened to Father Sergei [former priest at Krasnokamensk, defrocked after declaring Khodorkovsky a political prisoner]?

MK: When I first heard about it, I was upset. But in his second interview, with Moskovsky Komsomolets, he told the truth. I didn’t look closely at the first one. Perhaps he overstated things. But in the second one he got it right. He came to me, said Mikhail Borisovich, this will probably be the last time we will see each other. And I said that can’t be true, I know [patriarch] Aleksy fairly well. He’s the kind of person who couldn’t do that. And he said, you know Aleksy, and I know our church system. And he turned out right. He knows our church system better than I do. That upset me, but you have to say he went into all this with his eyes open. I very much respect him for that, and thank him. But a person has his beliefs, he was in prison with Kovalyov. He’s a man with convictions.

FT: Do you consider yourself an Orthodox person, a believer?

MK:That’s a complicated question. I have thought a lot about this. And I’d rather keep it to myself.

FT: People say that you raised the level of people’s legal awareness in the prison…

MK: I don’t know to what extent I was responsible for that. I don’t think that I was responsible. But people understood that they could defend their rights by legal means. Previously, when there was a problem, there were protests etc. But when I came to the colony, the situation changed in that commissions started to arrive constantly, and the prosecutor came. And the first time the prosecutor came, one person went to see him, and only to talk about his case, not about his imprisonment. And everyone looked at him like he was nuts. The second time the prosecutor came, there was a whole queue waiting for him 40 people. So to a significant degree, life started to change.

FT: What can you say about the new case against you?

MK: I have already said everything in my original statement. But I’m being accused of stealing all the oil produced by Yukos over six years. It will be interesting to see how they intend to prove that. It will be curious.

There have been various verdicts against Yukos. And the judges contradict each other on all sorts of questions, even in spite of the fact that the cases have all been supported by the federal prosecutor. So even they can’t make sense of it all, because they’re so confused about what they want. The accusations are connected not with a 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. So the verdicts start to contradict one another.

FT: What’s your attitude to the auctions of Yukos assets that took place last year?

MK: I reacted to all that fairly calmly. Because I used up all my nerves in 2004, when a company that was working well was seized and handed over to Rosneft. Rosneft today is basically Yukos with a bit added on. To a large extent, it’s the same people. The production capacity is 75 per cent the same. Rosneft is Yukos after three years of peredelok.

FT: But now its market capitalisation is something like $80bn.

MK:Yes. But for me, to a significant extent, it’s more important that people didn’t lose their jobs, that they didn’t have to move to other cities and so on. That would be a catastrophe. I was always concerned that production would stop. A few times we came close to that, but fortunately, thanks to the efforts of the people who were themselves often under the threat of arrest, we preserved production. And people didn’t lose their job

FT.com / World - Khodorkovsky ‘laundered $23bn’

2008-02-07T00:44:00.000Z

By Catherine Belton in Moscow

Published: February 9 2007 13:55 | Last updated: February 9 2007 15:01

Russian prosecutors on Friday said Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the jailed Yukos oil tycoon, laundered more than $23bn (€18bn, £12bn), in Yukos oil sales, disclosing the first details of charges that could keep the Kremlin opponent in jail for a further 10 years.

The prosecutors made their first full statement on fresh charges brought against Mr Khodorkovsky and his business partner Platon Lebedev earlier this week.

They said Mr Khodorkovsky and Mr Lebedev had illegally acquired more than $25bn worth of oil from Yukos subsidiaries from 1998 to 2003, passing the crude off as “well fluid” and then selling it on to consumers at prices three or four times higher. The pair are also accused of laundering the proceeds.

The prosecutors said they were also charging the two former tycoons with siphoning off shares in Eastern Oil Company in 1998 that should have belonged to the state.

Defence lawyers for Mr Khodorkovsky have said the new charges are part of a political effort to keep him behind bars beyond presidential elections in 2008 and to prevent him from funding opposition parties.

But Marina Gridneva, a spokeswoman for the prosecutors’ office, said on Friday: “There is nothing political about this. This is a purely criminal case.”

Mr Khodorkovsky maintains his innocence, in part through a website documenting his trial.

BBC NEWS | Europe | Medical plea fails in Yukos case

2008-02-02T01:27:00.000Z

A court in Russia has ruled that a jailed former top manager of the disbanded oil group Yukos cannot be transferred to a clinic for treatment.

Vasily Aleksanyan, 36, is reported to be suffering from Aids.

He was jailed in 2006 after being found guilty of embezzlement. He was deputy to the Yukos founder, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who is also in prison.

Mr Khodorkovsky says he is on hunger strike in support of Mr Aleksanyan.

He says officials are punishing Mr Aleksanyan for refusing to sign false confessions.

'Moral choice'

In a letter posted on his supporters' website on Wednesday, Mr Khodorkovsky said Mr Aleksanyan had been refused medication and deliberately placed in poor conditions.

He said he had no choice but to "abandon the legal framework" and start a hunger strike.

"I am facing an impossible moral choice: admit to crimes I haven't committed and save the life of a man, but destroy the fate of innocents who will be charged as my accomplices," he said.

Mr Aleksanyan says he has developed serious health complications and is nearly blind.

Russia's human rights ombudsman Vladimir Lukin has called for an independent medical examination of Mr Aleksanyan.

Mr Khodorkovsky, the founder of Yukos and once Russia's richest man, is serving an eight-year sentence at a prison camp in Siberia.

His supporters have always said that his arrest was punishment for his support of pro-Western opposition political parties.

Mr Khodorkovsky's international lawyer Robert Amsterdam said Russia was "flouting not only international law but the norms of morality".

RussiaToday : News : Freedom denied for dying ex-Yukos executive

2008-02-02T01:25:00.000Z

Russia’s Federal Bureau for the Enforcement of Punishment is threatening legal action against the lawyer of former Yukos executive Vasily Aleksanyan. It claims her accusations that he is not receiving proper medical treatment are obstructing the course of justice.

The former Yukos executive says he's living in poor conditions and can't attend court hearings because he's suffering from AIDS and cancer.

"Am I Jack the Ripper? Have I blown up a train or killed two hundred people? How can you justify what is going on here? There is no justification for doing this," Aleksanyan said.

Nevertheless, a Moscow court rejected Aleksanyan’s request to be transferred to a medical centre, saying there was no evidence presented to prove it’s necessary.

Aleksanyan will have to remain in detention for the rest of his trial on charges of embezzlement, money laundering and tax evasion.

The Russian Prison Service says it's Aleksanyan who is refusing treatment.

In fact some specialists say Aleksanyan is in much better living conditions than tens of thousands of other HIV-infected prisoners in Russia.

“More than 400,000 Russians are infected and 40,000 of them are in prison, and to my mind Aleksanyan is living in much better conditions compared to other HIV-infected prisoners,” said Vadim Pokrovsky, AIDS specialist.

Aleksanyan’s supporters

In Moscow, around 70 human rights activists are taking part in a picket to draw attention to Aleksanyan's fate.

Jailed Yukos shareholder, Platon Lebedev, has announced he's ready to make further confessions if this will help Aleksanyan get better treatment from the authorities.

Former Yukos CEO, Mikhail Khodorkovsky has been on hunger strike for three days, demanding better care for his former colleague. Then Khodorkovsky has stopped his dry hunger strike saying he will now only drink water.

Meantime authorities say Khodorkovsky could be force-fed if he refuses to eat.

The former Yukos CEO is serving his eight-year sentence in Siberia for fraud and tax evasion.

The Moscow Times : Aleksanyan Says He Is Receiving Care

2008-02-02T01:15:00.000Z

Former Yukos executive Vasily Aleksanyan, who claims he was denied treatment for AIDS while in detention for not testifying against Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev, said Thursday he was now receiving "unprecedented attention and care" in detention.

Aleksanyan, who is awaiting trial for embezzlement and tax evasion, also revealed to reporters at the Simonovsky District Court that he had been diagnosed with terminal lymphoma.

Aleksanyan is currently being held at the Matrosskaya Tishina detention facility in eastern Moscow, and he told reporters at the courthouse that his conditions were improved Wednesday.

"My cell was cleaned," said Aleksanyan, who appeared exhausted. "I returned from yesterday's hearing and thought I was in the wrong place."

The court is to rule Friday on a possible release and transfer to a clinic.

Human rights ombudsman Vladimir Lukin called Thursday for Aleksanyan to be provided with an independent medical examination.

Aleksanyan also thanked Khodorkovsky, the former Yukos CEO currently serving an eight-year prison term in Siberia, for going on a hunger strike Wednesday to protest prosecutors' handling of Aleksanyan.

"I am grateful for his support, although I'd rather he not put his life at risk, as he has four children," Aleksanyan said.

Aleksanyan has claimed that he has been deliberately denied medical treatment for AIDS while in detention as punishment for refusing to testify against his former bosses -- Khodorkovsky and Lebedev, who is also serving out an eight-year prison term.

By Svetlana Osadchuk and Natalya Krainova
Staff Writers

The Mocow Times : Aleksanyan Gets Support of Old Boss

2008-02-02T01:09:00.000Z

Jailed former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky said Wednesday that he had started a hunger strike to protest prosecutors' handling of Vasily Aleksanyan, a former Yukos executive who claims he has been denied medical treatment for AIDS while in detention.

A preliminary hearing in Aleksanyan's case, meanwhile, was cut short Wednesday after the suspect began feeling unwell, Aleksanyan's lawyer said.

In an appeal to Prosecutor General Yury Chaika, Khodorkovsky said he had no choice but to go on a hunger strike to protest the authorities' treatment of Aleksanyan.

"I hope that the department you head will make the decision to guarantee Aleksanyan life and medical assistance," Khodorkovsky wrote in a letter that was posted on his web site, Khodorkovsky.ru.

One of Khodorkovsky's lawyers, Robert Amsterdam, said the hunger strike was understandable.

"Everyone has been totally shocked by this case," Amsterdam said by telephone from Canada. "Mr. Chaika and the executive power need to understand their personal liability in this case. They are giving orders in a system so that is so corrupt that officials can threaten suspects with murder to elicit false testimony."

Aleksanyan, who is facing embezzlement and tax evasion charges, claims he has been deliberately denied medical treatment for AIDS while in detention as punishment for refusing to testify against his former bosses, Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev.

Khodorkovsky and Lebedev are each serving out eight-year prison terms after being convicted of fraud and tax evasion in 2005.

The Federal Prison Service claims that Aleksanyan has merely refused treatment.

The Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights has issued three requests for Aleksanyan, 36, to be transferred to a special hospital -- requests that have been refused by Russian courts.

Russia is a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights.

At Wednesday's hearing at the Simonovsky District Court, doctors were called in to examine Aleksanyan after he "suddenly felt unwell," his lawyer, Yelena Lvova, said.

"His temperature rose to 39 degrees, and doctors said he was in no condition to continue the hearing," Lvova said.

The hearing was to continue Thursday, though Lvova said she would "try to postpone the trial" until her client is feeling better.

The judge on Wednesday was to set a trial date and rule whether Aleksanyan would remain in custody, a Moscow City Court spokeswoman said.

Human rights ombudsman Vladimir Lukin sent a letter to Chaika on Wednesday requesting that the prosecutor general "take measures" to secure the necessary treatment for Aleksanyan, Lukin's assistant said.

By David Nowak
Staff Writer

Yukos official 'could die in prison'

2008-01-17T02:21:00.000Z

By Catherine Belton in Moscow

Lawyers acting for a jailed senior Yukos official say their client could die in prison after Russian officials three times failed to act on a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights that he receive immediate medical treatment at a specialised clinic.

Vasily Aleksanyan, the former vice-president of the bankrupt Russian oil company, is suffering from a life-threatening illness for which prison doctors prescribed urgent medication and therapy 14 months ago, his lawyers said.

But Mr Aleksanyan has yet to receive any treatment or be transferred to a specialist civilian clinic where investigators and the ECHR have said the treatment, which has potentially lethal side effects, should be administered. Instead he has been transferred to a prison hospital, where he contracted tuberculosis two months ago. He has gone blind and is unable to read the fraud and embezzlement charges against him.

"His condition is so bad that he could die at any moment. He could die from a cold," said Yelena Lvova, a defence lawyer for Mr Aleksanyan, who was arrested in March 2006 as part of a case against Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Yukos's owner. Ms Lvova said she did not have Mr Alexanyan's permission to disclose the exact nature of his illness.

"The way the Russian government is behaving right now can only be described as shockingly repulsive," said Drew Holiner, Mr Aleksanyan's lawyer in the ECHR case.

"If he dies in prison the ECHR is going to find Russia is responsible for that."

The federal prison service said a Russian court would have to issue a ruling before Mr Aleksanyan could be transferred to a specialist clinic. Russia's prosecutors' office declined to comment on the case. The investigations committee at the prosecutor-general's office was not able to comment.

Mr Aleksanyan's condition is likely also to raise concern about other former Yukos officials jailed in Russia's prisons, which are notorious for cramped and insanitary conditions and for rampant tuberculosis. Mr Khodorkovsky, the country's former richest man, who was arrested in October 2003 in a Kremlin campaign said by critics to be politically motivated, is reported by his lawyers to be "more or less" in good health.

Defence lawyers said Russia's ignoring of the ECHR rulings on Mr Aleksanyan was a sign of the Kremlin's increasing impunity in violating basic human rights.

"The higher the oil price goes, the greater the silence in the west over violations of human rights in Russia, and the worse things get here. We're like a voice crying in the desert," said Yury Shmidt, a lead defence lawyer for Mr Khodorkovsky.

The rulings of the ECHR have not been published because of sensitive information contained in the case.

The Moscow Times : Ex-Yukos Executive Tells of Blackmail

2008-01-17T01:47:00.000Z

By Christian Lowe
Reuters

A gravely ill former Yukos executive has accused his jailers of trying to blackmail him into testifying against old associates by denying him the medical treatment he needs to stay alive.

The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg made the highly unusual step of issuing three requests for Vasily Aleksanyan, 36, to be transferred to a specialist hospital, but authorities have not complied.

Aleksanyan's case is politically charged because he is a former vice president of the now-defunct Yukos oil firm, whose main shareholder, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, is serving an eight-year sentence in a Siberian prison after falling foul of the Kremlin.

Investigators deny any unlawful treatment of Aleksanyan, who is awaiting trial on charges of fraud and tax evasion. They say he has made his own health worse by rejecting the treatment offered in the prison sanatorium.

At a Supreme Court hearing on Wednesday where his lawyers challenged his detention, prosecutor Vladimir Khomutovsky said Aleksanyan had HIV/AIDS. His lawyers said they did not have their client's consent to disclose his illness.

In an open letter he passed out of the Matrosskaya Tishina prison in Moscow, Aleksanyan said he was now nearly blind, had a constant fever and was in urgent need of a course of drug treatment that was only available outside prison.

"The prognosis is death," said his lawyer, Yelena Lvova, when asked what would happen if Aleksanyan, in detention since April 2006, was not transferred to a civilian hospital soon.

Kremlin critics say Yukos and its executives became the targets of an official vendetta because they challenged President Vladimir Putin's power. Khodorkovsky is expected to stand trial soon on a set of new charges.

The investigators handling Aleksanyan's case said in a written statement that "in accordance with current legislation, the defendant has been offered comprehensive medical treatment, which he has declined."

"The investigation of this criminal case is being conducted in exact accordance with the demands of criminal procedural law," the Investigative Committee, a semi-autonomous agency under the auspices of the Prosecutor General's Office, said in the statement.

Aleksanyan took part in Wednesday's hearing by video link from his prison, where he could be seen in a small metal cage. He appeared thin and tired, and sat hunched over. He struggled to get to his feet to address the court.

When the judge adjourned the hearing until Jan. 22, Aleksanyan said, "I hope I will survive for another week."

In the open letter, Aleksanyan accused the authorities of deliberately driving him to a condition where he was "close to death" by denying him treatment.

"Attempts have not ceased to make me give false evidence and provide testimony incriminating other Yukos bosses, in exchange for giving me bail on health grounds, that is, in effect, in exchange for life."

The Federal Prison Service did not respond to a request for comment.

Aleksanyan has a brother who works as a translator in the Reuters Moscow office.

The Arrest That Proved a Turning Point

2006-10-25T21:58:00.000+01:00

By Catherine Belton
Staff Writer

Former business partners of Mikhail Khodorkovsky will remember the day of his arrest three years ago Wednesday as a turning point toward state control.

But Khodorkovsky himself will spend the third anniversary of his Oct. 25 arrest meeting with lawyers and packing goods at his Chita region prison camp.

The nation's former richest man will spend the day as usual with a wake-up call at 6 a.m. from his bunk in the bleak barracks of prison camp Yag 14/10 in the uranium-mining town of Krasnokamensk. He will pack goods for most of the day and then talk for four hours with his Moscow lawyer, Anton Drel.

Drel, who also met with Khodorkovsky on Tuesday, said his client's physical condition looked to be worsening. "I did not see any serious change in his character over these three years," Drel said by telephone from Krasnokamensk. "But I can't say he looked good. He looks worse and worse. He is very pale."

As Khodorkovsky appears to be weakening, the man he once challenged, President Vladimir Putin, is at the height of his powers. Putin will go live on television Wednesday to field questions in a phone-in show.

The Kremlin's legal attack has routed Khodorkovsky's Menatep business empire and sent his business partners either to jail or scurrying into exile in Israel or London in fear of arrest. His empire, once worth more than $30 billion, lies in ruins with Yuganskneftegaz, Yukos' former main production unit, now in state hands. The rest of the company will go under the hammer in bankruptcy proceedings.

The Kremlin has sought to portray the onslaught as a justified attack on a corrupt empire over financial crimes, while critics claim it is political retribution for the challenge Khodorkovsky posed to Putin's hold on power.

Khodorkovsky's dawn arrest at gunpoint on a Novosibirsk runway led to a huge shift in the way the country was run. In the wake of Khodorkovsky's arrest, Putin radically sped up his drive to consolidate power and clamp down on opposition. At the same time, the state has renationalized swathes of the economy, and enabled other key industries to be consolidated into national champions headed by Kremlin-friendly tycoons.

"The arrest let the genie out of the bottle. The state has taken control of everything," said Alexander Temerko, a former Yukos vice president and a Khodorkovsky ally for nearly 20 years. "The level of political and economic freedom has been radically curtailed."

"The arrest was a turning point for the expansion of the state. As a result, we have moved from having a market economy to having a half planned economy based on the state," said Vladimir Ryzhkov, one of the few independent deputies remaining in the State Duma. "After the Yukos affair and the arrest of Khodorkovsky, the country has ... turned to a system of state capitalism.

After state oil firm Rosneft took over Yuganskneftegaz via a bargain auction in December 2004, Gazprom followed suit a year later to take over Roman Abramovich's Sibneft. As the holdings of the state in the oil sector have climbed from 4 percent of output to more than one-third, the state has moved to bring other sectors of the economy under its control, such as carmaker AvtoVAZ and VSMPO-Avisma, the world's biggest titanium producer. Now foreign oil ventures, including the Shell-led Sakhalin-2 venture, face pressure to hand over more control of projects to state energy companies.

Khodorkovsky's arrest came three weeks after he signed a protocol of understanding with ExxonMobil to sell a significant chunk of his shares in Yukos, Temerko said.

"It was also a turning point in the behavior of business, Ryzhkov said. "If before business could support the opposition because this was the norm in the 90s, after the arrest business came to understand that the condition for staying in business is absolute loyalty to the Kremlin."

"The arrest also created an atmosphere of fear. Now anything is possible," he said. "Everyone is frightened."

International lawyers, now representing Khodorkovsky from the safer vantage point of the United States, said Tuesday that they had documented a "campaign of intimidation," beatings, jailings and other threats aimed at silencing Khodorkovsky's Russian lawyers. They said efforts to have Khodorkovsky's lawyers disbarred last year and the jailing of other members of his legal team were in breach of the Constitution, the European Convention on Human Rights and the rule of law.

"While Khodorkovsky sits in prison he relies more than ever on his lawyers to get the message out," Sanford Saunders, a defense lawyer for Greenburg Traurig, said by telephone from Washington. "Article 48 of the Russian Constitution guarantees people the right to counsel. It is sacrosanct to any country that adheres to the rule of law. The Russian government is completely disregarding it.

"When his lawyers can't speak freely without fearing for their lives, it really does become impossible for him," said Charles Krause, a spokesman for Khodorkovsky.

While Krause has been denied a visa to enter Russia since the beginning of the year, Khodorkovsky's international defense lawyer, Robert Amsterdam, was expelled from the country last year.

Khodorkovsky's Russian lawyers have fared far worse, they said.

Mikhail Zhidkov, a lawyer representing Alexei Pichugin, the Yukos security chief convicted of organizing a series of contract killings and attempted murders, was attacked and beaten in October 2005, the U.S. defense lawyers said, while many representing Khodorkovsky faced attempts to have them disbarred following the collapse of his appeal last year.

Khodorkovsky was sentenced to eight years in a prison camp in May 2005 after a trio of judges found him guilty of large-scale tax evasion and fraud.

While other defense lawyers such as Drel and Karina Moskalenko have had their offices searched, others from Khodorkovsky's legal team have been jailed or forced to flee the country in fear of arrest.

Yukos lead counsel Vasily Aleksanyan was arrested earlier this year, just days after he agreed to head the company's Moscow office in a bid to prevent it breaking away from the company's London-based managers. Svetlana Bakhmina, a mid-ranking Yukos lawyer and mother of two children, was jailed in December 2004. Others, such as Pavel Ivlev and Dmitry Gololobov, have fled.

"This is an effort to go after anyone providing legal assistance to Khodorkovsky," John Pappalardo, another U.S.-based lawyer, said by telephone from Washington. "This is part of an effort to make this go away. It is insufficient to put Khodorkovsky in Chita and [Khodorkovsky business partner Platon] Lebedev above the Arctic Circle."

The Moscow Times: Court Declares Yukos Bankrupt

2006-08-02T01:49:00.000+01:00

By Valeria Korchagina
Staff Writer

The Moscow Arbitration Court ordered the bankruptcy and liquidation of Yukos on Tuesday, putting the last nail in the coffin of the country's one-time biggest oil major.

The ruling brought to an end the 1,139-day saga that started with the arrest of Yukos security chief Alexei Pichugin on murder charges on June 19, 2003. The arrest was the start of a legal onslaught that destroyed Yukos and sent its CEO and majority shareholder, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, to jail.

Tuesday's ruling also begins the official carve-up of the fallen oil giant as state-controlled energy firms Rosneft and Gazprom vie for what remains of Khodorkovsky's former empire.

Moscow Arbitration Court Judge Pavel Markov ruled Tuesday evening that Yukos' remaining assets were to be sold off within a year. He also appointed Eduard Rebgun, until Tuesday the court-appointed temporary manager, to oversee the sell-off.

"It is the death sentence for the company," Yukos lawyer Drew Holiner told reporters after the hearing.

Yukos is likely to appeal the decision, he said.

Holiner also lamented that Rebgun, in his new capacity of liquidation manager, would unlikely be able to ensure that the assets fetched the best price.

"The liquidation manager's task is to sell assets as fast as possible to pay off the debt. He will not have the opportunity to wait for favorable market conditions," Holiner said, Interfax reported.

Yukos has one month to appeal.

The decision was widely expected, given that since 2003 Yukos has not had much luck in persuading Russian courts to take its side.

"This is not the end, this is the funeral," Yevgeny Yasin, the founder of the Higher School of Economics and a long-time supporter of Khodorkovsky's, told Ekho Moskvy radio on Tuesday. Khodorkovsky is serving an eight-year jail sentence in Siberia after he was found guilty on tax evasion and fraud charges last year. He has maintained throughout that the authorities' attacks on him and his company were political.

Khodorkovsky's lawyer Anton Drel said Tuesday that he could not immediately reach his client for comment.

In a sign that the bankruptcy was seen as inevitable, Moody's Investors Service earlier Tuesday withdrew the Ca issuer and corporate family ratings of Yukos.

The ruling was delivered after trading closed on RTS, the dollar-denominated trading floor where Yukos shares are still listed.

Stephen Theede, Yukos CEO since 2004, resigned his post in mid-July ahead of the creditors' meeting that recommended the company be declared bankrupt, and called the proceedings a sham.

Yukos lawyers on Tuesday tried to postpone the ruling, citing a variety of technical and legal reasons. Among the arguments employed in favor of a delay were: that not enough time had passed since the July 25 creditors' meeting recommended bankruptcy; that another court had yet to rule on a tax demand; and that the European Court of Justice had yet to hear Yukos' complaint in which the company objects to the state's entire back tax legal onslaught.

Rebgun rejected all the company's arguments, as did Markov, Interfax reported.

"All claims that have been included into the creditors' claims list have been approved by the courts," a representative of the creditors said during the hearing, adding that since no date had been set for a hearing in the European Court of Justice, the delay could "stretch out up to a year," Interfax reported.

Representatives of Rosneft also followed suit, arguing against any delay in the bankruptcy proceedings.

Burdened by billions of dollars in back tax claims, Yukos has put up a long but not particularly successful rear-guard fight. It has tried to dispute claims totaling more than $30 billion in Russian courts and attempted to fight back by seeking justice abroad.

Yukos has proposed a number of restructuring plans, including most recently at the July 25 creditors' meeting, where the company promised to pay off $18.2 billion of outstanding debts within 18 months.

Creditors rejected the plan, however, and instead voted to bankrupt and dismantle the oil firm. While Yukos management valued the company at $38 billion, Rebgun told the meeting that the company's assets were worth $17.7 billion, or less than the firm's liabilities, and called for the company to be liquidated.

Claims against Yukos backed by Russian courts total 491 billion rubles ($18.2 billion).

The Federal Tax Service tops the creditors' list, claiming 354 billion rubles ($13.1 billion). Next in line is Yuganskneftegaz, Yukos' former main production unit that is now owned by Rosneft, claiming 109 billion rubles ($4 billion).

Further down the list are two Yukos subsidiaries Tomskneft and Samaraneftegaz, claiming 12.3 billion rubles ($460 million) and 1.85 billion rubles ($69 million), respectively.

Tomskneft and Samaraneftgaz are also among the choicest assets likely to be sought by Rosneft, which would overtake LUKoil as Russia's biggest oil firm if it acquired them.

Among other Yukos assets, Gazprom had been seeking to buy Yukos' 20 percent stake in Gazprom Neft, formerly Sibneft, for which Yukos was asking $4 billion.

Al Breach, head of research at UBS investment bank, said Tuesday's ruling was "a very finite end to what has been an unhappy story."

Beyond the ruling, however, the way the Yukos assets sales are handled is still important, Breach said.

A worrisome sign is the valuation of Yukos assets at $17.7 billion, or some 40 percent less than most observers consider their real value, he said.

Breach also noted that, while the Yukos case in general had helped the state to introduce better tax discipline, it had hurt the judicial process and the rule of law.

"So it does matter how the sales are done now," he said.

Telegraph: Yukos bankruptcy tips balance in favour of state control of oil

2006-08-02T01:01:00.000+01:00

By Nick Allen in Moscow

The Moscow Court of Arbitration declared the Yukos oil company bankrupt yesterday, driving the final nail into the coffin of the business empire built up by now jailed tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

Official receivers had earlier concluded that the once leading oil company was £9.8bn in debt while having a market value of £9.5bn.

Its American chief executive officer Steven Theede tendered his resignation last month in protest at what he called farcical proceedings and a gross undervaluation of the company, which he claimed was worth more than double the official estimate.

Yukos lawyers said that they would appeal against the decision of the court.

The company was largely dismembered by the state when it could not meet demands for billions in back taxes and fines that were imposed after Mr Khodorkovsky was arrested in 2003 on tax fraud charges.

The main inheritor of Yukos' assets, the Russian state oil company Rosneft, took over the outstanding debt from the banks.

Together with Yukos's other main creditors, Rosneft recently rejected a plan to save the company and called for it to be declared bankrupt.

The oil major's demise is widely seen as Kremlin retribution for Mr Khodorkovsky's business and political ambitions.

Formerly Russia's richest man, he was jailed last year for tax evasion and fraud.

Rosneft later bought Yukos' main production unit Yuganskneftegaz from a shadowy shell company after it was sold at compulsory auction in order to cover the tax debts.

Russian President Vladimir Putin's former economics adviser, Andrei Illarionov, at the time called the acquisition the "scam of the year."

The removal of Yukos tips the balance in favour of state control of the Russian oil sector.

Radio Free Europe: 'They Are Trying To Break Him'

2006-07-31T01:03:00.000+01:00

Inna Khodorkovskaya tells RFE/RL about the impact of prison on her husband, the former tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and the pressures she faces from the authorities.

PRAGUE, July 31, 2006 (RFE/RL) -- Since Mikhail Khodorkovsky was imprisoned three years ago, his wife and their three children have lived in a house in the leafy Moscow suburb of Zhukovka.

The building and the land around it is -- or rather was -- owned by an affiliate of Yukos, the oil company that once made Khodorkovsky one of the richest and most influential men in Russia, Khodorkovskaya explained in a July 25 interview with RFE/RL's Russian Service.

But on May 2 this year, Khodorkovskaya says, a Moscow court impounded the family home, saying it was part of the ongoing investigation into tax evasion at Yukos.

Khodorkovskaya suspects it will not be long before she and the wives of other Yukos executives living in Zhukovka are forced out.

It is part, she says, of the relentless pressure that the authorities are piling on her husband and other Yukos officials.

A Man Much Changed

Khodorkovsky is now incarcerated in a prison camp deep in Siberia. Inna is permitted to visit once every three months. But getting there is a major effort in itself: a nine-hour flight, followed by a 15-hour train journey, followed by a 40-minute car ride.

She is allowed to stay with her husband for three days in a prison hostel that some Russian papers suggest borders on the luxurious. In fact, she insists, they share a simple room furnished with a bed, a chair and a cupboard.

Khodorkovskaya finds her husband much changed -- a consequence, she says, of the psychological, and sometimes physical pressure he is subjected to.
"They raise the pressure, then they reduce it and then they raise it again. So there's no straight upward line, they're just trying to drain him."

"They're trying to break him, nothing more, nothing less," she says of the prison authorities. "These are methods that have probably long been worked on and refined. I would say that it works on the principle of amplitude. They raise the pressure, then they reduce it and then they raise it again. So there's no straight upward line, they're just trying to drain him."

His biggest difficulty, she says, is the isolation and the mental vacuum caused by his inactivity. But he is finding other ways to fill the gap.

"He reads a lot of religious literature. He's not a religious fanatic, he's not completely mad about religion," she says. "His interest is analytical. He doesn't push faith away, but he has begun to experience it in a new way. If before he approached the subject from a sort of historical point of view, now he feels closer to it."

A 'Political Prisoner'

The penal colony where Mikhail Khodorkovsky is serving his sentence Khodorkovskaya says she has no doubt that her husband is a political prisoner, sentenced to satisfy the ambitions of the men who now rule the Kremlin.

Khodorkovsky himself -- and many independent critics -- describe his trial as a staged farce and a warning to Russia's immensely wealthy oligarchs to stay out of politics.

The Kremlin disagrees. Khodorkovsky, it says, is a criminal who defrauded the state of a massive sum in taxes.
"Of course, no one suggested that things would get quite so bad, but right to the end he intended to stay here [in Russia]. And I did too."

Inna Khodorkovskaya says she and her husband had feared the state would come after him. Nonetheless, the couple had chosen to stay in Russia.

"It was our joint decision. We talked about whether to stay or go, but the decision was simple. What is there, out there? Of course, no one suggested that things would get quite so bad, but right to the end he intended to stay here. And I did too."

In that respect, she says, nothing has changed. If the authorities force her out of her home, she will stay in Russia. The critical issue now is how to bring up her family in the absence of a father.

But Khodorkovskaya betrays little bitterness.

Both she and her husband have been changed by the experience of the last few years, she says. But they will emerge stronger, she believes.

"There are moments when something serious happens in your life and your values change. And, naturally, recent events... my values have grown stronger, I would say. That's to say, my values have really crystallized," she says. "I can't say that they have changed fundamentally. But his probably have because he used to be in politics. Now he sees what's happening there from a slightly different perspective. Naturally, he has changed greatly.”

Lebedev's press center: “Outside I Play the So-Called “Justice” Game With My Lawyers”

2006-07-24T01:29:00.000+01:00

July 24, 2006

In an interview with Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, Platon Lebedev comments on his life in prison.

How did you spend the winter in Kharp? How was the Polar night?

I had felt boots sent to me from Moscow, size 50. The Federal Penitentiary Service did not provide these. The polar night is very long but it is not eternal, so you don’t have to think about it too much.

Do mosquitoes disturb you? How do you deal with them?

I am afraid of traditional methods – I slap my forehead. In the camp we have “Raptor” [mosquito repellent lotion], and we can use lotions outside, but not liquid, as they are afraid I will drink it. They say there will be black flies as well, which are even worse. I will compare and let you know.

What disturbs you most of all?

The idiocy of judges and other decisions-makers in this country.

Do you like your job?

In these conditions producing traps seems a decent job for your mind. However, they do not offer any job to suit my specialization.

Do you get any information from the outside world? Do you watch TV, read newspapers?

There is a TV in the camp, but they usually watch programmes that are not interesting for me… I regularly get Kommersant, Vedomosti, Nezavisimaya Gazeta and Novaya Gazeta newspapers, although they come with a delay.

With whom do you talk about the world events?

With my lawyers.

With whom do you drink tea?

In the camp I drink tea without any excessive company.

Do you play anything in the camp?

I don’t play any games in here, but outside the camp I play the so-called “justice” game together with my lawyers.

Do you discuss the world events with the administration of the penal colony?

It is not common here.

Are you on duty in the camp like everyone else?

Why should I be any different from everyone else, apart from in shoe size?

The Times: Prophet who warns against Putin's 'energy imperialism' - Law - Times Online

2006-07-19T22:51:00.000+01:00

By Derek Brower
Civil rights lawyer Robert Amsterdam believes the West is sacrificing democracy on the altar of profit

SHOULD RUSSIA’S state-owned oil company Rosneft launch its $11 billion (£6 billion) initial public offering (IPO) on the London Stock Exchange this week, investors could well be laundering stolen assets — at least that is how Robert Amsterdam sees it. Amsterdam is lawyer to Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once known as the richest man in Russia when he was head of Yukos, the huge oil company.

Khodorkovsky’s plight may have slipped from the attention of many in the West — the oligarch was arrested in 2003 and charged with fraud, embezzlement and tax evasion; tried in 2004, he was sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment in 2006 — but Amsterdam is determined to change this. He sees the flotation as a way to recapture the agenda.

Amsterdam, a Canadian lawyer who has been at the centre of one of the world’s most watched legal cases for the past three years, is used to this kind of political battle. His relationship to Khodorkovsky has morphed from defence attorney into that of a travelling prophet, giving warning of the spread of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “energy imperialism”.

The Kremlin is attempting, according to Amsterdam, to “whitewash Khodorkovsky’s history, his phoney criminal prosecution and the history of Yukos”. The IPO is nothing less than “state theft” and anyone buying stock will be colluding in a climate of impunity that allows the Kremlin to operate with little regard for international law.

Amsterdam is not alone in that judgment. Others, including George Soros and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, have also questioned the morality of the IPO. Rosneft — with reserves of 19 million barrels of oil equivalent — is one of the biggest companies in the world. Its wealth is based on its acquisition of Yuganskneftegaz, the production company that Yukos was forced to sell to settle some of the massive tax debt the Kremlin said it owed.

Rosneft’s purchase of Yuganskneftegaz was seen as a state-orchestrated attempt to create a national oil major, and the destruction of Yukos as part of a politically motivated campaign against Khodorkovsky.

His belligerent, outspoken style has earned Amsterdam the enmity of the Kremlin. Last September, on the day the appeal against Khodorkovsky’s imprisonment was heard and immediately dismissed, Russia’s secret police force, the FSB, knocked on Amsterdam’s door in the middle of the night and told him he had 24 hours to leave Russia.

Amsterdam has been based in London since, but travels relentlessly in the cause of his client, speaking “from the highest mountain in the loudest voice” to anyone who will listen. In recent weeks he met Garry Kasparov, the former chess world champion-turned-democratic politician, and Lech Walesa, and visited the Bundestag.

The morality argument might not wash with hard-nosed investors, but the “dangerous precedent” of this IPO is a threat to any other investor in Russia, claims Amsterdam. By prosecuting the Yukos case, which was based on retroactive tax claims against the company, and proceeding with the flotation, Amsterdam says that the Kremlin has “taken away any security of property” in the country.

Why this should concern the lawyer of a man who has been sentenced to an eight-year prison sentence in far-away Siberia is a moot question. But Amsterdam believes that the “impunity” with which Russia is able to consolidate its “illegal” destruction of his client’s erstwhile company is directly related to the fate of Khodorkovsky himself.

As long as the international governments, the financial institutions that have participated in the valuation of Yuganskneftegaz and the Rosneft flotation, and Russia’s partners in the energy sphere continue to give Russia a “free pass” over issues like the Yukos case and the Khodorkovsky affair, his client will remain in prison,Amsterdam argues.

In Russia, Amsterdam is dismissed as nothing more than a PR spokesman for Khodorkovsky, and is accused of “going political”. But, says Amsterdam, it was the corruption of the “show trial” in Moscow that forced Khodorkovsky’s legal team to take his defence public. “When people use courts as stage props,” says Amsterdam, “there is no alternative”.

The extra-legal nature of the “project”, as those close to Khodorkovsky and his legal team call the efforts to free him, has drawn Amsterdam into the realm of energy politics. Khodorkovsky, he believes, is a “hostage” of the Kremlin in its imperialist ambitions and until these ambitions are recognised by the West, Khodorkovsky will remain in prison.

But first Amsterdam believes Russia must be forced to accept the international rule of law, including the European Energy Charter, a treaty governing international energy co-operation. “When Russia starts to acknowledge the rule of law in any area — but particularly the energy area — then my client starts to be set free.”

Amsterdam says: “A culture of impunity has put Khodorkovsky in jail. He will serve as a symbol of the destruction of the rule of law in Russia. And the minute that the Russians start being accountable, there is a psychological change that, in my view, begins to open the prison door.”

Amsterdam has not seen Khodorkovsky since his appeal failed. His client is now imprisoned in a “concentration camp” near Krasnokamensk. Earlier this year a fellow inmate slashed Khodorkovsky across the face with a knife, which lends some credence to Amsterdam’s claim that his first ambition is simply to keep him alive.

7.18.2006

RIA Novosti : Court raises Yugansk creditor claims to Yukos to $4 bln

2006-07-17T17:51:00.000+01:00

16:03 | 17/ 07/ 2006

MOSCOW, July 17 (RIA Novosti) - The Moscow Arbitration Court increased Monday the claims of creditors of Yuganskneftegaz to Yukos Oil Company from 75 billion rubles (about $2.7 billion) to 108.7 billion rubles (about $4 billion).

The court satisfied a motion filed by the former main production unit of Yukos to include additional claims in the register of Yukos creditors.

The Independents : Loser in the Rosneft float rots in Siberian prison cell

2006-07-15T17:49:00.000+01:00

By Michael Harrison
Published: 15 July 2006

Today will be much the same as every other day for the inmates of Krasnokamensk penal colony IK-10 in eastern Siberia. As President Vladimir Putin greets the world leaders gathered 4,000 miles away in Moscow for the G8 Summit, Mikhail Khodorkovsky will wake, as usual, in the cramped barracks he shares with 80 prisoners. It is day 994 of his incarceration for tax fraud - 1,926 days to go.

Krasnokamensk, it hardly needs saying, is no holiday camp. Built in the 1960s to house 1,000 prisoners, it provides labour for a nearby uranium mine and processing plant. The jail and surrounding area are said to be heavily contaminated with radioactive waste which is seeping into the water table. Human rights monitors have declared Krasnokamensk an environmental catastrophe. The region, which borders Mongolia and China, also suffers from extreme weather. Right now, it is suffocatingly hot but in the winter the temperature can drop to -33C.

After a breakfast of porridge or bread and boiled potatoes (there is no fruit, fish or eggs and little meat), the daily grind begins. Convicts work either in the nearby Priargunsky uranium plant or, if they are lucky, in the car repair, carpentry and sewing workshops in the penal colony. Khodorkovsky works in the sewing room for 10 hours a day.

The Russians could not have chosen to imprison him in a more remote or godforsaken place. From Moscow, where his wife and three children live, the journey to the prison takes six hours by plane and then a further 15 hours by train. Since Krasnokamensk is six hours ahead of Moscow, it takes more than a day to complete the trip.

Khodorkovsky is allowed four visits a year from relatives, although his lawyers have more frequent access. His mother Marina and his wife Inna have visited three times but his father is too frail to undertake the journey and his children have not seen him for nearly three years.

His has limited contact with the outside world. He gets the odd newspaper but is not allowed access to the internet and can watch only what the other inmates want to watch on television. But this does not mean the outside world has forgotten about Khodorkovsky. He receives 500 letters a day and there is a website dedicated to his trial and imprisonment and the ongoing battle to win compensation for his former company Yukos.

He has no special privileges in jail - in fact it is the opposite. He is watched constantly by two special guards and has been placed in solitary confinement three times since his transfer to Krasnokamensk in October - on one occasion for drinking tea in an undesignated area, on another for unauthorised possession of two lemons.

Inna says although he has turned slim and grey, he remains mentally sharp. His inner strength has not deserted him but the threat of physical violence is ever present. Three months ago he was assaulted in his sleep with a knife. Although Khodorkovsky's lawyers are habitually strip-searched, the inmate who conducted the attack concealed the weapon in his belongings for two months. The prison administration did not press charges.

At night Khodorkovsky can hear the rumble of trains transporting oil from what were once his oilfields across the border and into China - another reminder of what used to be and why oil has become such a powerful tool for the Kremlin. Three weeks ago, Khodorkovsky marked his 43rd birthday in penal colony IK-10. Life expectancy there is 42. Its most famous inmate is now living on borrowed time.

Interfax : European MPs call for moving Khodorkovsky to jail near Moscow

2006-07-14T17:47:00.000+01:00

OSCOW. July 14 (Interfax) - Members of the European parliament
have called for transferring former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky from
Siberia to a prison near Moscow and guaranteeing him a fair trail. The
request is addressed to President Vladimir Putin in an open letter
posted on Khodorkovsky's official website.
The G8 presidency and St. Petersburg summit can become a good
chance for Russia to get rid of accusations of brutal treatment of
Khodorkovsky, the prisoner, the letter says. It invites Putin to move
Khodorkovsky to a prison near Moscow in keeping with Russian law and
guaranteeing him a fair trial as soon as possible.
Over 100 members of the European parliament from 23 EU countries
expressed concern over the conditions of Khodorkovsky's confinement.
They view him as a political prisoner, and his trial, a parody of
justice.
The signatories include Hans-Gert Poettering, head of the European
People's Party, and Elmar Brok, head of the International Affairs
Committee of the European Parliament.

The Independent : Robert R. Amsterdam: Allowing this sale of 'stolen goods' is a disgrace

2006-07-10T18:13:00.000+01:00

Published: 10 July 2006

I was involved in defending Mikhail Khodorkovsky during one of the worst show-trials since the Stalin era. I was forcibly deported from Russia, and other lawyers were, and remain, incarcerated for defending Mr Khodorkovsky. But nothing prepared me for the London Stock Exchange allowing itself to be involved while Mr Khodorkovsky and other entrepreneurs involved with Yukos have been sent to the gulag to silence them.

The imminent flotation of Rosneft, the main Kremlin-controlled state oil company, is anticipated by foreign investors seeking to profit from Russia's growing oil wealth. This flotation presents a new calculus in investment management. Russia has invented the "Kremlin Index", based on the "complicity discount". What price will the Kremlin oil barons need to strike to motivate people to join them in their violations of human rights and the rule of law?

This offering is all about legitimising Rosneft's ill-gotten gains. The lion's share of the value of Rosneft is made up of assets formerly belonging to the Yukos oil company, built into one of the world's largest private oil companies by Mr Khodorkovsky.

With Mr Khodorkovsky and others jailed on specious charges, and Yukos crumbling under the weight of baseless tax claims, Rosneft obtained billions of dollars worth of Yukos assets through a questionable auction orchestrated by the Kremlin.

These are the assets now being brought to the London Stock Exchange, with the assistance of bankers who have been crucial in bringing the expropriated assets to the London Market. Rosneft's acquisition of Yuganskneftegaz, the main production subsidiary of Yukos, was described as the "swindle of the year" by a universally respected Russian presidential adviser, who resigned in protest.

Andrei Illarionov said "the enigma of the year" was to know how a shady front company, created just days before the auction with charter capital of only $300, was able to win Yukos' core production assets for $9.35bn, then transfer these assets to Rosneft in its sale to the latter days after its winning bid.

In a legitimate auction, the Yukos assets could have fetched more than $20bn. Where did the front company gather $9.35bn, given that all foreign banks stayed away from financing bids at the auction for fear of the legal consequences? Mr Illarionov said the funds were "taken from the citizens", adding: "Russia is no longer a free country."

This flotation presents foreign investors with a choice and an opportunity. The choice is whether or not to invest in what I consider stolen goods. Choosing to invest in Rosneft is investing against human rights and the rule of law, since brutal disrespect for both is what made the flotation possible.

At the close of his trial, Mr Khodorkovsky said: "The whole country knows why I have been put in prison. It is so that I do not hinder the pillaging of Yukos."

The opportunity presented by the Rosneft flotation is to take a principled stand, responding with a resounding nyet, to send a clear message to Moscow that the funds and the respect of foreign investors must be earned.

The proposed Rosneft financing raises numerous critical issues for international investors and capital markets. These concerns include the failure of the Russian state to adhere to international standards of disclosure, its attempt to strong-arm international investment banks into supporting its international financing efforts, its riding roughshod over foreign investors in Yukos, and its wilful disdain for the rights in property of investors.

Unless governments and regulators of Western capital markets stop this financing, not only is it probable that investors foolish enough to purchase Rosneft will suffer the sort of shabby treatment meted out to Yukos shareholders, but their tacit support of these Russian initiatives will harm western capital markets.

Robert Amsterdam is International defence counsel of Mikhail Khodorkovsky

Jerusalem Post : Soliciting sympathy

2006-06-29T23:16:00.000+01:00

Mikhail Khodorkovsky celebrated his 43th birthday on Tuesday. Despite the occasion, he spent the day alone, as he now spends all of his days. Khodorkovsky has been placed in solitary confinement in a Siberian prison a year into a nine-year sentence for fraud and tax evasion.

That punishment far exceeds the crime, according to his attorneys, who in any case label the charges fabricated and politically motivated. Though it has been a full year since the verdict was delivered, Khodorkovsky's lawyers have continue to crusade on his behalf. Perhaps the most outspoken member of his team, Robert Amsterdam, made his case in Israel recently when he gave an interview to The Jerusalem Post during a brief visit.

The Canadian-born lawyer accuses Russian President Vladimir Putin's administration of not only wrongfully prosecuting and mistreating his client, but of silencing opposition and eroding private enterprise. He's not the only one to give voice to such accusations, though Amsterdam does so more robustly and with better soundbites than many others.

A host of human rights groups criticized Khodorkovsky's arrest, while the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe passed a resolution declaring it reeked of suggestions that the interest of the state "goes beyond the mere pursuit of criminal justice, and includes elements such as the weakening of an outspoken political opponent, the intimidation of other wealthy individuals and the regaining of strategic economic assets."

Amsterdam has a background international litigation and human rights work, and his profile since taking on Khodorkovsky has soared - thelawyer.com this year placed him on its "Hot 100" list. He said that after years of being treated as a Cassandra, the West is finally starting to take his warnings seriously.

In 2003, Khodorkovsky, then the CEO of the oil giant, Yukos, was arrested along with his business associate, Platon Lebedov. Several other "oligarchs" who also felt under threat left the country, including some who ended up in Israel. They were both found guilty and sent to separate prisons in what has been dubbed Russia's biggest post-Soviet trial.

Even Sergei Markov, a Kremlin-affiliated analyst who directs Russia's Institute of Political Studies, admitted that the Khodorkovsky trial had political motivations. In a telephone interview from Moscow, Markov stressed his belief that Khodorkovsky is guilty as charged. "But this trial was started just against Khodorkovsky and not any others, and this was for political reasons," he said. "The political reason was very simple: he didn't follow the new rules of the game for oligarchs."

Or rather the rule: "Don't pretend to be political leaders," according to Markov.

For refusing to remove himself from political activities, which happened to be opposed to Putin's, Khodorkovsky went through a trial that was "not ideal" in the words of Markov - but then, he noted, no Russian trials are.

"The [state's] attorneys made some mistakes in the procedures, and many more in number than in American [courts], but for sure less than in most Russian courts," because of the intense international scrutiny, he said. And, he noted, the will of the people was behind bringing Khodorkovsky to court - to see the disastrous control of the oligarchs ended and the dirty dealings that gave them billions repaid.

Yitzhak Brudny, a senior lecturer in politics and history at Jerusalem's Hebrew University, agreed that there is much popular resentment against the oligarchs and many were happy to see Khodorkovsky punished - though he attributed some of that to the government's whipping up of anti-oligarch sentiment.

Even so, Brudny said, "of course it was a miscarriage of justice."

Khodorkovsky provoked Putin both by extending the influence of his Yukos oil empire abroad and by failing to show adequate respect - wearing a "turtleneck [and] a cheap Chinese watch" to meetings with the president - according to Brudny.

"He had political ambitions of his own. A guy with that much money is a threat," he said. He backed Amsterdam's assessment that the verdict was predetermined; the proceedings heavily flawed, including harassment of lawyers and witnesses; and Khodorkovsky's treatment in custody appalling.

Even the grounds on which the trial was brought were problematic, by Brudny's estimation. "He did a lot of stuff, but a lot of what he did was legal then," which hasn't kept him from being prosecuted for it now, he said - on top of which Russian legal codes are so contradictory that what constitutes an offense is largely a matter of interpretation, and whim.

But Brudny pointed out that that "Khodorkovsky wasn't exactly an angel on these matters" and dismissed Amsterdam's claims that the greatest reason for his client's prosecution was his pressing for greater transparency in business.

"Khodorkovsky understood that the way he conducted his business was a political challenge to the Kremlin. Western observers talk about 'political' in the sense that he was trying to get control of this political area or that. That's all fairly unimportant compared to the role model he was developing in Russia, which was that transparency and privatization was the way for Russia to go in the future," Amsterdam told the Post. "There is no greater threat to a government run by the Interior Ministry and the secret police than transparency, because a secret police government thrives on secrecy."

"They [the Kremlin] couldn't care less whether he was transparent or not," Brudny countered, noting that Khodorkovsky had developed a reputation for successfully lobbying the legislature to pass laws in Yukos's favor and had only begun to push for Western standards of reporting and tax regulations in the past few years. "That was a nice PR piece."

Brudny also doubts how well the West is listening to what Amsterdam is shouting from the rooftops.

"The West is more wary of Russia," he noted, but also said: "Let's not be idealistic ... The West is going to buy Russian gas regardless of what regime is there."

Israel, for one, currently buys about 90 percent of its oil from Russia. But that doesn't mean it's dependent on the the former superpower for its energy resources, according to analyst Amit Mor, CEO of the Herzliya-based Eco Energy investment and consulting firm. He said Israel can buy oil on the international market from a host of other sources, likely for a similar price.

While in Israel, Amsterdam warned the Jewish state not to enter into any energy deals with Russia, particularly with state-owned Gazprom and Rosneft (the latter of whose IPO, slated for fall, Amsterdam brands an attempt to "launder" its stolen Yukos assets). "Dealing with Gazprom is in fact making the Kremlin a partner in whatever you do," he said, alluding to ongoing discussions between Jerusalem and Moscow over the possibility of a revolutionary linking up of gas supply lines. Those kinds of arrangements, he warned, are part of Russia's gameplan to use energy to influence foreign countries.

"There is a political risk for Israel importing gas from Russia, since Russia already demonstrated earlier this year that it can cut its supply of gas" for political reasons, Mor acknowledged, referring to Gazprom's decision to cut deliveries to Ukraine this winter. But he added that Israel hasn't even thought about the policy implications of the theoretical Gazprom deal because it wouldn't come to pass for years, if ever.

Markov, however, defended the Ukraine move as a sign that Putin is "giving up the political approach," since he is now selling gas to Ukraine as market prices. "They decided business is business."

Brudny termed Markov's comment disingenuous. "Give me a break. It's a political decision," he said. "Russia wants to use this [energy resources] for leverage, because this is one of the few levers left to it."

Still, he said, when it comes to the Western take on Putin's machinations, "Even the anti-Communists don't think that this is the Soviet Union."

What is Khodorkovsky's status right now?
Khodorkovsky is illegally held seven time zones away from Moscow. Under Russian law he's supposed to be near his family. They have not only put him on the other side of the world, on the border of China, they have put him in the most inaccessible location in the gulag. And there is a gulag, and there are political prisoners. Khodorkovsky is one of a growing number of political prisoners, of which there are hundreds.

What do you mean by gulag?
This is not a normal penitentiary system. These are not normal camps. Russia does have some normal penitentiaries, but their camp system is not normal. They have Khodorkovsky on the border of China, in freezing and completely isolating conditions, contrary to international human rights law, contrary to international prisons standards ... Khodorkovsky was stabbed a few weeks ago. The onus is on the government of Russia to explain how this could have happened while he is under their illegal arrest. Khodorkovsky is at risk of his life ...

Khodorkovsky is the world's first energy hostage. This entire attack, including his illegal arrest and the illegal arrest of others, and the charges against others, some of whom are even here, this legal attack can now be seen in retrospect to be the ugliest and most corrupt corporate takeover in history, because the people in charge have shown themselves willing to corrupt the courts, to corrupt the judges, and to engage the secret police of Russia, all in this attempt to not only steal Yukos, but to reenergize the state's role in the energy sector as a means of both projecting Russian power and obtaining vast profits, some of which does not find its way into the state coffers.

You have also called the court proceedings a show trial.
The judges weren't independent; the prosecutors did not represent an independent arm of the state. In other words, under European law, there's this notion of equality of arms, which is actually guaranteed under the European Convention, which means that the defense and the prosecution have equal access to the evidence, basically on an equal footing. In this case, that was simply not the case. In fact, the prosecution, and I can give you examples, would engage in harassment of witnesses - orchestrated harassment - so that days before they'd be called to testify by the defense, the prosecutors would call them in. It got so bad that the lawyers had to basically stand up and say we're not calling witnesses, because these people are having to flee the country. There's an ongoing level of intimidation.

The judges would consistently deny exonerating evidence onto the record. They would come up with fairly ridiculous rulings in order to avoid having exculpatory evidence put on the record. Khodorkovsky and Lebedov would be brought into the court as if they had committed acts of mass terror instead of fraud. They'd be brought in by special forces ...

The judges would play around with dates to try to time it so it wouldn't embarrass Putin. For instance, when the sentence was handed out, they delayed it past [an] anniversary celebration, so that when Putin had world leaders to Russia, he wouldn't be embarrassed by the verdict. It was just a constant manipulation. And sensitive hearings for the trial would always happen on Friday, after the news cycle. It was just a consistent thing.

As recently as a few weeks ago, the Russia authorities served an order on the orphanage that Khodorkovsky's parents run, to try to confiscate the orphanage which would destroy the lives of dozens of poor orphans. And they served this order late on a Friday during a holiday period in Russia. It's just commonly done, cynically done, all the time to attempt to manage the press.

I've heard from people who followed the case that there were a lot of shady dealings involving Khodorkovsky, and that there are real grounds for charges to be brought against him.
I can only tell you that if they had the goods on this man, then somebody has to explain to me why they didn't show them. This was the forum. They had him on trial and they fabricated the evidence. So if they did have it, and I've heard that from people, the Russian press is full of it. They accept that it was a political case. They accept that the trial was bogus. But they add in their final paragraph to make sure that they don't fall too far afoul, "But we know he did something bad somewhere."

I'm not talking about the Russian press.
Even generally, that's not law. [Let's say] you're charged with defamation. Someone can say, "I saw you beat someone up six years ago." That's not really justification. And I think that's something we need to understand. Because the people who are propagating this are the FSB (Federal Security Services), and the worst oligarch on the worst day does not compare with what you are dealing with just with the organization of prosecutors in Russia, let alone the FSB, when they are determined to get you because a political higher-up has decided he wants to steal a company or somebody has become this new enemy of the people. The only organized criminal group I saw during the trial was the prosecution working with the FSB to treat these people in an inhuman way and fabricate evidence ...

I think trying to worry about charges that were never brought in the '90s seems to be much more of a deflection. They had their chance to try Khodorkovsky. [It] is very clear to me that if they had anything on him, they would have actually conducted a real trial, and they would have produced real evidence and they would have produced real witnesses, and it speaks volumes that they couldn't.

Where do you think the West is on this?
There has been a tectonic shift in Europe and the United States toward Russia. People have woken up. People do understand. A year ago I was whining. I'm no longer whining ...

People who always try to resurrect the '90s even though it might not be legally relevant [are] trying to mentally rationalize the West's silence, because it doesn't fit together - this image we have of the New Russia with what's going on. What I say to everyone is that Rosneft is the "Ah-ha" moment. Rosneft is the reason and the moment where we can see the entire plot hatched by the Kremlin come to life. Because by putting Rosneft on the market, what the bureaucrats are doing is whitening the black money. They are getting western investors to be complicit in their behavior so that after the term of Putin they can sanitize their ill-gotten gains.

This flies with Western investors?
No. Rosneft has raised a lot of questions with Russian investors. But my sense is that we won't stop it. The Russian Federation has vast amounts of money. They have a vast PR organization working with them. They have oodles and oodles of the best lawyers money can buy. I'm sure this will go ahead. My job at this point is simply to make people aware of what they're dealing with.

When did this shift happen?
If Yukos was the wake-up call, the shut off of gas to the Ukraine was the slap across the face. Now each ongoing attempt by the Kremlin - for instance, there is an ongoing dispute between Russia and Belarus, between Russia and Ukraine, between Russia and Georgia, all over money. Each one of these starts to be seen in a larger context ...

The attack on Yukos, the attack on Khodorkovsky is not a small thing. It's a huge sea change.

What do you think the West should be doing?
The US is in a position, along with the rest of the western world, to push Russia to abide by international law. We've given Russia a free pass. They consistently violate the European Convention[s]; they consistently violate the Euro-Russia Partnership; they consistently violate international human rights norms; and they violate a very important treaty called the energy charter, which they don't acknowledge having ratified, but which I believe in law they have ratified.

Why have they gotten a "free pass"?
Because the West has not formulated a coherent and consistent policy on Russian behavior and on Russian energy. Because the Russians have been incredibly good at dividing the West, dividing the Europeans, dividing Germany from everyone else. Because Germany is the one that has the inside track on energy - dividing Europe from the United States. Clearly the US administration has done a complete recalibration of the Russian relationship, and that's only positive. They understand that the Russians are the major obstacle to energy security in the world, coming only a close number two to Iran. They understand that it is critically necessary that Russia [return] to the energy charter. And I am suggesting that it is critically necessary that the West exert pressure on behalf of Khodorkovsky to demonstrate that the West understands that Russia's turn away from international legal principles, from a market economy, from privatization, will ultimately be disastrous for all, because without the security of the rule of law, the hundreds of billions of dollars that are needed for investment in Russia will not occur. Russia must have foreign investment in order for energy security to be guaranteed, but that foreign investment can't happen in an environment where the protection of private property doesn't exist.

Are there any specific actions you'd like to see the West take?
One of the most important things for the West to do is make a commitment to stop dealing bilaterally with Russia on issues relating both to energy and the rule of law, and to have a united front [against] Russia on these issues. Because I completely believe that it is not Europe that is dependent on Russia for energy, it is Russia that is dependent on Europe and the United States for currency. As soon as we internalize that, we will be able to start an honest dialogue.

What about Israel?
For Israel, I would only stress that it should not make a bilateral mistake of overdependence on Gazprom. There is a critical, critical need for Israel, like every other country, to diversify its energy sources. And one of the things that is clear is that the Russian Federation is determined to use energy as a foreign policy weapon. So if that's the case, Israel has to go into that relationship with its eyes wide open. And as Gazprom is run by the Kremlin, when the people from Gazprom come to negotiate a deal, they need to be asked about Iran, they need to be asked about the missiles for Syria. And frankly, they need to be asked about Khodorkovsky and the rule of law, because those are all issues that are relevant when you're dealing with a long-term supplier of energy [resources].

What the Minister of Infrastructure needs to understand is that Gazprom is the Kremlin. It is not a separate business. I don't care who owns some of its shares. It is controlled directly by the Kremlin and it is the avowed policy of the Kremlin to use Gazprom for political purposes. That needs to be internalized and understood. So if Israel wants to make itself dependent on the Kremlin for energy, that could be of significant impact on a whole gamut of Israeli relationships.

Is there not a fear of alienating Russia and pushing it too hard on the issue of Iran and Syria?
It's a fear born of ignorance. Because if you know Russia, you know the only country that has more to fear from Iran [than Israel] is Russia. And I don't think that's well perceived. People treat Russia as if somehow it's going to be an honest broker with Iran. You need to look at the fact that Russia has an open conflict going on, and understand the dynamic of that conflict with Iran to know that whether or not Israel buys gas from Gazprom has very little to do in the mix.

The Russian public doesn't seem to have much sympathy for Khodorkovsky or feel he has been wrongly imprisoned.
I believe there's far more empathy for Khodorkovsky in Russia than people will admit in polls. You have to remember that when he ran for the Duma last year, the reason they accelerated the appeal and made it a transparent farce - the judges on that appeal didn't even try to hide that the timing of the appeal was directly related to Khodorkovsky running for office - they were afraid he was going to win. So this blackening of his name that goes on continuously isn't working for the Russians, and that's why I'm afraid they'll come up with some other fabricated charge.

Khodorkovsky's father is Jewish. Is anti-Semitism a factor in his case?
It's complex. Khodorkovsky is not Jewish in the practicing sense, but in Russia he is perceived as Jewish by some. It's hard to say, but the incredibly vicious nature of the attack on this man - combined with the nature of the FSB, which has taken [over] from the KGB - certainly leads me to believe that [anti-Semitism] is one element, as much as one would like to completely deny it.

Is it a factor in your own case? The authorities actually made you leave the country.
I think I was expelled not because I was a Jew, but because I was his lawyer. I was exposed to anti-Semitic abuse, but my Russian colleagues are absolute heroes, because what happened to me is nothing compared to the threat they face day in and day out.

How has being barred from Russia affected your work?
The attempt was to stop me from functioning. I haven't stopped functioning, because so much of what the Russians want to achieve is outside of Russia. They want to maintain their impunity with the West, and I'm quite willing to deal with them in Europe and the United States. Certainly it's my goal to return to Russia. The problem is that when I first started to go to Russia, we could reach people on television, we could reach people in the press, we could reach people on radio. By the time of the trial, it was very clear to me that what we were trying to say to people on television wasn't getting heard. The state television had basically been completely overtaken. Some of the newspapers, if they're not owned by the government, have a selective level of censorship. And in radio [there's] a strong amount of government control and self-censorship.

Do you seen any reason for hope in the case?
Sure, because we have a completely unpredictable scenario in Russia; because there is no rule of law; because there is no certainty on either the economic or legal front. In a strange way, it plays for you because it leads to opportunity ... Russia is nothing if not capable of change. I mean, the Putin of the second term is barely recognizable from the Putin of the first term, so anything is possible.

School Caught in Oil Tycoon's Misfortune

2006-05-24T15:44:00.000+01:00

Russia Freezes Assets of Khodorkovsky-Funded Home Serving Orphans of Conflict

KORALOVO, Russia -- On the grounds of an 18th-century estate, Rita Dzgoyeva has found some refuge from her memories and a place to get a free, first-class education.

The 17-year-old was a hostage during the Beslan school siege in September 2004, and her mother and older sister were killed in the standoff's bloody end, which left 331 people dead.

Dzgoyeva, who still bears scars from shrapnel, is one of 135 students at a private boarding school here in the far suburbs of Moscow. Most are orphans, the offspring of Russian servicemen killed in action or the victims of terrorist attacks linked to the conflict in the southern Russian republic of Chechnya.

Government officials used to visit and marvel at the state-of-the-art school, built in the middle of the estate, and the student dormitories, which rival the fancy weekend homes that dot the surrounding countryside of rolling fields and woods. Regional governments from across Russia clamored to secure admission for children from their regions.

No more. The patron of the Podmoskovny Lyceum, as the school is called, is Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former oil tycoon who is serving an eight-year prison sentence for fraud and tax evasion following a prosecution that supporters said was politically motivated because he represented a threat to President Vladimir Putin's authority.

Khodorkovsky has been stripped of much of his wealth and his company, Yukos, has been largely dismantled. Now prosecutors are targeting his philanthropic projects. Earlier this month, the Russian prosecutor's office froze the school's assets, the prelude to what the school's directors -- Khodorkovsky's parents -- fear will be a full-scale legal assault to shut it down.

"They know very well that for Misha this is like a favorite baby," said Marina Khodorkovskaya, 71, using the diminutive for Mikhail to refer to her son, who is serving his prison term thousands of miles away in Siberia. "It's another attempt to take revenge."

She said she was bewildered that a state that has already seized billions of dollars worth of property from Yukos is now targeting a school that is helping children scarred by some of the country's worst tragedies. The school, Khodorkovskaya said, has not been told why its assets have been frozen.

A spokeswoman for the prosecutor's office confirmed that the school's assets were frozen but declined to comment further.

In March, prosecutors seized the bank accounts of Open Russia, a nongovernmental organization that Khodorkovsky founded to promote democracy and human rights. Starved of cash, the group was forced to close. The courts have rejected arguments that it is a separate entity and should not be a party to the case against Yukos.

The school is being funded by the Khodorkovsky Foundation in London, which is beyond the reach of Russian prosecutors, but the 250-acre piece of prime real estate is a fat target.

Khodorkovsky acquired a 99-year-lease on the estate in 1994 and created a home for children, who were bused to local schools. Three years ago, at a cost of $15 million, he opened a school on the grounds, as well as seven dormitories that could house as many as 250 children. Within months, he was arrested.

The school costs about $30,000 a year per student to run. In addition to core subjects, it offers music, dance, choir, art, photography, theater and fashion design. There is a gym, a small swimming pool, computer rooms, a large library, and a kitchen and canteen that defy stereotypes about school lunches. The wall of the school is adorned with student work and valuable paintings donated by Khodorkovsky.

There is also a clinic with four doctors, a dental suite and a staff of psychologists on-site to assist the children. A room made of tons of mineral salt provides relief for children with breathing problems.

"We are an elite school for children with problems," said Alexander Yarulov, the headmaster. The school is loosely modeled on a British public or elite school. The students, all in uniform, appear unfailingly polite. They universally beam when Khodorkovsky's mother passes by, and some stop to kiss her. Khodorkovskaya spends most of her time at the school now.

"Not any school can replace your home, but this school had replaced mine," said Viktoria Nikitina, whose father, a Russian border guard, is stationed in a remote area that has no educational facilities. "I've loved it here."

A deep unease has settled into the student body. At a school assembly last week, students reported on the week's news, as they do every week, but Thursday's report included material on their own uncertain fate. A student reported straightforwardly that human rights activists and others planned to protest in Moscow. He also noted that the Moscow Helsinki Group, a leading human rights organization, had called for the release of political prisoners, including Khodorkovsky.

"It's a special place," said Dzgoyeva, from Beslan. "And if it hadn't been for this school, I don't know what would have happened to me."

"We're all trying not to think about what might happen," said Sasha Zakharova, 16, an orphan from the Tyumen region in Siberia who came to the school three years ago when her grandmother could no longer care for her. If she hadn't been accepted, she likely would have ended up in a bleak state orphanage.

Khodorkovsky, who was recently slashed in the face by another inmate, has spoken to his father about what has been happening at the school.

Marina Khodorkovskaya said her son told his father that, as long as they both persevered, "This lyceum will continue to live."

By Peter Finn
Washington Post Foreign Service

Haaretz : The Retreat from Moscow (Interview with Leonid Nevzlin)

2006-05-06T00:51:00.000+01:00

By Yossi Melman

It's hard to believe that this smiling man with the somewhat youthful appearance, dressed casually in jeans, is suspected of involvement in several murders. Of course, looks can be misleading. Yet doubt does arise when it comes to the Russian legal system, which is pursuing the proceedings against him. In the West, Israel included, Russian justice long ago lost its credibility, certainly insofar as the rise and fall of the Yukos energy corporation goes. Up until three years ago, Leonid Nevzlin was the number 2 man in the company and one of the most influential oligarchs in Russia and its Jewish community. His fortune in stocks and holdings at Yukos was estimated then at $2 billion. Had Yukos continued to exist and to benefit from the rise in oil prices, his assets could have easily doubled to $4 billion.

But three years ago, the Kremlin, under orders from Vladimir Putin, took over Yukos. The company, which at its peak was worth $40 billion, went bankrupt, and its assets were sold off to Putin associates. Two of the major stockholders, Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev, are rotting in jail. Three others, including Nevzlin, fled to Israel, where they found refuge and became Israeli citizens less than three years ago.

But one needn't feel too sorry for Nevzlin. Even though he lost all his assets in Russia, by his own estimate, he is still worth about $1 billion. Within the relatively short time that he has been living here, he has become one of the biggest philanthropists in Israel. Together with two partners, Vladimir Dubov and Mikhail Brudno, he established the Nadav Foundation (the name is composed of the Hebrew initials of the men's surnames). He was also appointed chairman of Beth Hatefutsoth - the Nahum Goldmann Museum of the Jewish Diaspora. His contributions to aliyah projects and educational institutions in Israel total some $15 million. Only Bank Hapoalim has given more during the same period, but not much more.

At first, the Russian state prosecution accused him of tax evasion and other fraud-related offenses. Then it "upgraded" the charge to include ordering murders. The Russian government accuses Nevzlin of organizing a double contract killing and instructing Alexei Pichugin, a Yukos security officer, to murder businessman Sergei Gorin and his wife, Olga, who supposedly knew some of Yukos' dark secrets. The legal problem is that the bodies of the murder victims were never found, and in fact there is no hard evidence that they died.

Pichugin's trial has been going on behind closed doors, a rare arrangement for a criminal trial. Investigators from the Russian federal security service (the FSB) put extremely heavy pressure on Pichugin to incriminate Nevzlin. But Pichugin refused to comply and denied all involvement by either himself or Nevzlin in the murders. Despite this, the court convicted Pichugin on the basis of dubious evidence, including the hearsay of a convicted criminal. The criminal said that Gurin told him he had been involved in organizing assaults against Yukos' rivals - at Pichugin's instruction. According to the criminal's testimony, Gurin also said that if something ever happened to him, then Pichugin and the Yukos corporation would be the ones behind it.

The state prosecutor also accuses Nevzlin of having ordered the assassinations of two other people (the orders were not carried out). Because of these charges, the Russian government is asking Israel (and the United States, where Nevzlin recently visited) to extradite him. The Justice Ministry in Jerusalem, which has received two such requests, has no intention of complying - certainly not on the basis of the evidence supplied by the Russian state prosecutor. A source in the Justice Ministry said that "The Russians have not provided the least evidence to justify the opening of an investigation, let alone the extradition of an Israeli citizen to a country whose justice system is problematic, to put it mildly." Before long, an official message along these lines will probably be transmitted to Moscow.

Another murder mystery

But the Putin government isn't ready to leave Nevzlin alone. It views him as one of its biggest enemies, for one thing because Nevzlin is involved in organizing public campaigns in the West against the government in Russia, and in denouncing the government in Russia, which he compares to that of Stalin. Last week, another murder trial began in Moscow, in which Alexei Pichugin is the defendant, though it's clear that Nevzlin is the real target this time, too.

In this case, Pichugin is accused of having murdered Vladimir Petukhov, the mayor of Nefteyugansk, a city of 100,000 in Western Siberia, in 1998. Most of the city's inhabitants were employed by the Yukos production department. Petukhov, a petroleum engineer and a throwback to the Soviet era, was considered an honest and fair sort. He demanded that Yukos pay its past debts to the city. His obstinacy on this point brought him into confrontation with Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who refused to recognize the debt that had originated during the era of the Soviet Union, before he purchased the company.

At the time, Khodorkovsky was still in the first stage of his development as an oligarch. He was a hungry young man, without inhibitions, and in his race to the top he surrounded himself with a large network of bodyguards and security personnel, all alumni of the KGB and the FSB. The network was established to protect the company facilities from property theft and sabotage, but the security people behaved condescendingly toward the locals, as if they were above the law, or as if they embodied the law. The possibility that the mayor was murdered by local criminals, as his widow told the Moscow Times last week, is not deterring the state prosecutor from its attempt to show that the motive for the murder lies in the confrontation between the mayor and Yukos, Khodorkovsky and Nevzlin.

Are you a murderer?

Before Nevzlin answers the question, he offers a long explanation. He says that he recently read the writings of Ze'ev Jabotinsky and his disciple, Menachem Begin. He was especially intrigued by the chapter on the period of Begin's detention in harsh conditions in Soviet Gulag prison camps. He also read about the meeting Begin had with an interrogator from the NKVD, Stalin's secret police. Begin was accused of anti-Soviet activity and of involvement in acts of murder.

"The accusations and the meeting in the camp strengthened Begin's resolve. From there he began the intellectual and practical journey that led him to Palestine."

Are you comparing yourself to Begin?

"Of course not. But I also met with an interrogator, and this encounter changed my life for the better, and indirectly for the better of Israel, too."

And what about the murder charges?

"I'm prepared to give an accounting to any legal system, apart from the Russian one. I haven't done anything in my life to be ashamed of. I certainly didn't kill anyone or give orders to have anyone killed. It's all lies. In July 2003 I was summoned for questioning to give testimony regarding the claims that were made at the time against Yukos, claims having to do with taxes and monetary matters. The person who questioned me was an investigator from the general prosecution. But he was really acting on instructions and according to the plan of the FSB, the secret police who are continuing the work of the NKVD and the KGB.

"It wasn't a real interrogation, but more like a conversation and preliminary inquiry. I asked him: Maybe they - the FSB - are mistaken? Maybe they're making things up about me and lying? His answer was: They are never wrong and they never lie. It was the typical answer of a Marxist-Leninist. Absolute faith in their truth, which is usually an absolute lie, of course. The investigation and court system works like this: First they decide that you're guilty and then they select the agents whose job it is to supply the supposedly incriminating information."

Do you know the security officer who was convicted of murder - murder committed at your behest, according to the prosecution - and recently sentenced to decades in prison?

"I don't know him personally. He was one of the security officers who worked at Yukos. I met him once or twice. Always in social circumstances, when there was a party for company employees. There were 120,000 people working at Yukos. I knew the names and faces of about a thousand of them. Actually, I stopped working at Yukos in 1998. I continued to be a stockholder, but I devoted most of my time to public activity. I was a senator (in the Upper House of the Russian parliament), I was active in Jewish organizations and I nurtured the university that I founded. Therefore I was far removed from Yukos employees and had no reason or time to meet with low or mid-level company employees, such as a security officer."

Nevzlin vividly recalls the interrogation. For him, it was a watershed. It took place on July 4, 2003 - the U.S. Independence Day. Yukos' main shareholder, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the person most closely identified with the corporation, was also summoned for questioning then. They were interrogated at the same time, separately, in nearby rooms. At that point, the investigators did not make any mention of the murder charge. All that he and Khodorkovsky were asked to do, says Nevzlin, was to give testimony and respond to claims that financial irregularities had been discovered in the company, and to a suspicion of tax evasion. "The investigation then, like now, was ridiculous. It was 100 percent provocation. Afterward, I wasn't summoned for any more questioning."

Not long after the interrogation, Nevzlin came to Israel. He wishes to emphasize that he did not flee to Israel because of the investigation. But, naturally, it did play an important part in his decision. "I'd thought about making aliyah before that, when I was active in Jewish organizations. I felt solidarity with Israel and I considered myself a Zionist. Then I thought I'd be able to divide my time between Israel and Russia."

About two weeks after he was called in for questioning, Nevzlin began a three-month vacation that he planned to devote to the writing of his doctoral thesis. At the time, he was the rector of the Russian State University for the Humanities, of which he is quite proud. This was the first private university ever established in Russia, and it was made possible in large part by Nevzlin's sizeable financial contribution. His aim was to model it after a Western academic institution. Since he was the only university rector in Russia without a doctorate, he decided to take the time to write a dissertation.

The topic he chose was the influence of 18th-century and early 19th-century German philosophers, such as Hegel, on philosophical thought in Russia. At first he worked on the dissertation while vacationing in Cyprus. Then he moved on to Israel, where he rented an apartment in Jaffa. Surrounded by a computer, books, articles and beautiful women, he was really enjoying life. But the horizon was beginning to darken.

The arrest

At first, neither Nevzlin nor Khodorkovzky sensed any danger. They were rich and famous and influential both inside and outside Russia. Khodorkovsky was considered the wealthiest man in Russia. They were young, full of ambition, and had taken advantage of the age of corruption and privatization under president Boris Yeltsin to acquire extensive property that was sold for next to nothing. And they weren't the only ones. There was also Roman Abramovich, Vladimir Gusinsky, Boris Berezovsky, Mikhail Friedman, Vyacheslav Kantor, Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov and his wife, and dozens more clever entrepreneurs, many of them of Jewish background.

And thus the oligarch class grew - people who had nothing and within a few years became multimillionaires. In dollars, not rubles. Not content to just enjoy their riches, they also wanted to wield some influence in Russian and international politics. To appoint governors, senators, members of the Duma and government officials. Khodorkovsky was the driving force, and Nevzlin was his right-hand man. In 1994, when Nevzlin was 35, they bought the Rusprom Group and the Menatep Bank, and through them took control of Yukos. They became the major shareholders of the largest corporation in Russia, which was also one of the world's largest oil and gas companies.

They conducted negotiations for a potential merger with Sibneft, the oil company owned by oligarch Roman Abramovich. The American oil companies were eager to do business with them and several also held contacts regarding a potential merger. After the tough administrative practices of the early years, the Yukos owners tried to introduce a different management culture into their company, one that was less Russian and oligarchic, and to adopt Western models: proper management, relative transparency, the uprooting of corruption and bribery.

The government of Vladimir Putin might possibly have been able to live with all the business "whims" of the young, ambitious pair and their friends. After all, until quite recently, Putin was not opposed to the principles of capitalist economics, and had no objection to Russia being home to wealthy moguls and successful companies - just as long as they toed the line, were obedient, and most important, were devoid of any political ambitions. But the Yukos owners had objectives that crossed the lines demarcated by Putin and his people.

Perhaps Khodorkovsky and Nevzlin were too arrogant to notice the boundaries that had been set. Or perhaps they really didn't see them, or saw them but thought that if they crossed them, nothing bad would happen to them. After all, they were used to coming and going in the corridors of power in Washington and Western European capitals. And who would have thought that Putin would display such determination and tenacity in going after his target, to the point of carrying out what could be called a targeted economic assassination: The eradication of the company and the unrelenting persecution of its owners.

What apparently did them in, the straw that broke the camel's back, was their political and financial support for the liberal and centrist parties. Khodorkovsky, Nevzlin and the other top people at Yukos were patrons of the Union of Rightist Forces headed by Boris Nemtsov. These parties sought to seriously challenge Putin's presidency. There was also talk about Khodorkovsky submitting his candidacy for the 2004 presidential elections.

In late September 2003, while still waiting to be granted Israeli citizenship (which required him to spend three consecutive months in Israel), Nevzlin saw his partner for the last time. Khodorkovsky, who is not Jewish according to Jewish law (only his father is Jewish) and whose connection with Israel was exceedingly flimsy, came here for a brief visit on his way back to Russia from another business trip to the U.S. The meeting took place in a hotel by the Tel Aviv beach.

"Before that, I'd told him a number of times to leave Russia," says Nevzlin. "I realized already that Putin had us in his sights. All his friends told him to leave, at least for a while. But he was a man of principle. He decided to stay and fight to the end. At that last meeting of ours, I again told him that he ought to leave Russia. He asked me when I was returning to Russia. He said that he felt my absence and needed me by his side. I told him that I'd return after I finished writing my dissertation and after I received my Israeli citizenship. I was supposed to be back by November to defend my thesis at the Philosophy Institute in order to receive the degree, but deep down I knew that I wouldn't be going back to Russia."

Did you kiss at the end of the meeting?

"No, because that's not the Russian tradition. I prefer to kiss women and not men. Neither of us thought that it would be our last meeting."

And then, about a month after the meeting, came the well-publicized FSB raid and the arrest of Khodorkovsky. Were you surprised?

"No, I wasn't surprised by the arrest per se. But I was definitely surprised by the way in which they did it. They could have asked him to come in for questioning at the police station. But for the sake of dramatic effect, they preferred to make a nighttime raid with a special FSB force on his plane at a small airport outside Moscow, when he was on a lecture tour. It was all for show."

Are you angry at him for not listening to your advice and to the advice of your friends and not having escaped in time?

"I'm not angry at him. I just find it hard to understand. He had a great ability to see what was coming. He provided strategic forecasts. He had an analytic and scientific mind and always looked several steps ahead. But sometimes he didn't see what was happening right under his nose. It happens sometimes, even to geniuses. More than once I told him: How can you work with and put your trust in the corrupt scoundrels from the Kremlin? Had he heeded my advice and the recommendations of friends and left Russia, he wouldn't have been arrested and I have no doubt that then it would have been possible to reach a compromise with the authorities and to save the company, which would have continued to exist."

In the past couple of years, you and your two partners in Israel have spent a fortune on media and public relations campaigns for the sake of Khodorkovsky and against Putin. Does this stem from guilt feelings over the fact that you're here, living a free life, while he is languishing in prison? Just recently, there was a report that another prisoner attacked and wounded him.

"I don't feel guilt, because he was number 1 in the company and I was number 2. He made the decisions. I'll give you an example. I really wish that all human beings could be healthy and wealthy and I try to help those who don't have enough, but it's not because of me that they're in whatever condition they're in. I'm not responsible for wrecking their lives."

You've made some very blunt statements against Putin's government. You said that he is surrounded by anti-Semites and is leading Russia into a neo-Stalinist age.

"That's right. I still think so. The people sitting in the Kremlin are bandits and it's all corrupt. But enough about Russia. I want to talk about the present and the future and not about the past. About Israel and not about Russia."

Do you feel Israeli?

"Now, yes, but it took me some time to get used to being Israeli. Now I feel like an Israeli."

In what sense?

"I feel like a citizen of the state, that my home is here. My two daughters recently came to live in Israel and my ex-wife and her husband also made aliyah."

He may feel Israeli, but the interview was conducted in English. Nevzlin is still struggling with Hebrew.

The professional

Leonid Nevzlin was born in Moscow in 1959. He studied computers at the Institute of Oil and Gas Chemistry in Moscow and earned a degree as a software engineer. In the early 1980s, he worked at the Soviet Institute of Geology. In 1989, at the height of the perestroika and glasnost introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev, he joined forces with Mikhail Khodorkovsky and became a business entrepreneur. The rest is history.

Within five years, the two were owners of a bank, a holding company and - the jewel in the crown of their business empire - Yukos. Toward the end of the 1990s, Nevzlin cut down on his involvement in Yukos and, together with Khodorkovsky, devoted more time to political and public activity, with an emphasis on strengthening democracy and preserving human rights in Russia. At the end of 2001, he was elected as a senator and served as chairman of the Upper House's Foreign Affairs Committee.

In order to advance their goals, the two founded Open Russia, a nonprofit organization that offered funding to civil projects. Among other things, they established a school of public administration and an association for Internet learning. Above all, Nevzlin worked on his "baby": the liberal arts university. Unlike Khodorkovsky, Nevzlin was also involved in the Jewish community and donated generously to its organizations, like the ORT network. In 2001, he was elected president of the Jewish Congress in Russia (REK), succeeding Vladimir Gusinsky in the post.

He has been married twice (he is currently in the process of divorcing his second wife) and is considered a sought-after bachelor, but Nevzlin gently rebuffs all attempts to learn about his private life. He will only say that he has had an Israeli girlfriend for about a year now. As in Russia, in Israel, too, he is chiefly involved in education. He left the management of the business side of the company in which he is a partner, the Menatep Group, in the hands of Mikhail Brudno. Nevzlin estimates the company's worth at about $1.5 billion. He holds a 67 percent share (this includes Khodorkovsky's share, which Khodorkovsky transferred to Nevzlin). In the past two years, the company has invested several hundred million dollars in media businesses in Eastern and Central Europe, including in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland.

Members of Menatep's international advisory board include Stuart Eisenstadt, a former U.S. deputy treasury secretary, and Dr. Otto Graf Lambsdorff, a former economics minister of Germany. Its activity in Israel is limited. About a year ago it purchased 26 percent in Petrochemical Enterprises (IPE), in partnership with David Federman. Nevzlin says that he doesn't know exactly how big the company's financial investments are and that it doesn't interest him that much.

"I prefer to be a professional on liberal arts issues and to leave the running of the business to him [Brudno]," he says. We decided how much money to invest, together we determined the parameters, and from that moment on, Brudno is the one responsible for management and for making profits and that's it."

Money doesn't interest you?

"I don't read balance sheets. Money for me is just an instrumental thing and doesn't necessarily make people happy. It's just money."

The partnership with Federman, an owner of the Maccabi Tel Aviv Basketball Group, spawned rumors that Nevzlin had been offered the chance to buy the club's basketball team. Nevzlin adamantly denies this. Investments in sport don't interest him, even though up to age 40 he was an active athlete and practiced karate and ancient Chinese martial arts. In Israel, he walks on the Herzliya beach, near his home, and will soon obtain a license to fly ultra-light aircraft.

"I'm not interested in sports because I don't understand how it works - if it's a business or a charity," he says. And besides, he has no desire to imitate Arkady Gaydamak. "I met him a few times in Russia, but I have no business ties with him."

What do you think of how he conducts himself?

"He has his style and his ideas and I hope he doesn't need advice from me. But I've noticed that his attitude toward charity is like it's big business. But he's not to blame. He's a businessman. I hope he won't find that it's a mistake to judge contributions to the community only on the basis of the results of the bottom line on the balance sheet."

And do you know Lev Leviev?

"No. I don't know him personally."

Does the term "oligarch" offend you?

"It's a negative term. In countries with a centralized economy, like Russia, it is used to designate people who have a lot of money and influence on the government decisions."

Like you?

"We weren't oligarchs, because we weren't part of the government. In Russia there were oligarchs, like Abramovich, Friedman and others, who did influence the government. Not us. The government fought us."

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

2006-05-01T17:27:00.000+01:00

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

The Moscow Times: The Oil Town That Won't Forget Yukos

2006-04-26T00:16:00.000+01:00

NEFTEYUGANSK, Khanty-Mansiisk Autonomous District -- The headquarters of Yuganskneftegaz have been repainted and the logo of state-owned Rosneft now appears everywhere. There's a new gleaming gold plaque for the office of Rosneft president Sergei Bogdanchikov, and the boardroom is festooned with the white, black and gold corporate flags of Rosneft, the victor in a bitter war against Yugansk's previous owner, Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

As Rosneft tries to erase the traces of Khodorkovsky's shattered Yukos empire, it is stamping its own mark on Nefteyugansk, a Soviet-era settlement of 100,000 people whose outlying oil riches have made it a battleground in the years of perestroika, privatization and, now, renationalization.

The move is not just about the acquisition of Yugansk, which was the center of Khodorkovsky's empire before he was arrested on charges of fraud and tax evasion more than two years ago. Rosneft is also getting into politics, fielding its candidate in the town's mayoral elections on Sunday.

"We understand that we need to have some kind of power in the administration," said Sergei Bouzounov, Yugansk's business manager. "We are interested in having someone we can work with."

The mayor's office, like the oil surrounding Nefteyugansk, has a way of changing hands with each new power elite in Moscow.

After Yuganskneftegaz was snapped up by Khodorkovsky's Bank Menatep in 1996, the city's mayor, Vladimir Petukhov, fought bitterly against the new management, accusing them of failing to pay taxes and preparing mass layoffs.

In June 1998, Petukhov was shot dead, and he was succeeded by a mayor who allied himself with Khodorkovsky. Now that mayor is gone, in jail on charges of fraud and abuse of office.

As Rosneft tries to secure its hold over the town's administration and cement its new position as one of the country's top oil producers in an upcoming IPO, the Kremlin is preparing to turn the spotlight onto Petukhov's murder -- an episode, it will attempt to show, that reveals Khodorkovsky's reign at Yukos in its worst colors.

On Thursday, former Yukos security chief Alexei Pichugin will go on public trial in the Moscow City Court, accused of organizing the killing of Petukhov and the 1998 murder of Valentina Korneyeva, as well as two attempts on the life of Yevgeny Rybin, managing director of East Petroleum Handelsgas, a business rival to Yukos.

Last year, Pichugin was found guilty in a separate murder trial that was held behind closed doors, but this time the authorities are opening the trial to public scrutiny. Prosecutors have said they have evidence Pichugin carried out the killings on the orders of a key Khodorkovsky lieutenant, Leonid Nevzlin.

"This was a systematic machine that had a hierarchy all of its own," said Olga Kostina, a former Khodorkovsky adviser, who accused Pichugin of being behind an attempt on her life; Pichugin was convicted of the assassination attempt in the closed trial last year. "In this trial there will be a chance to understand all of this. This time it will be an open trial."

Kostina now works as a public relations aide for the Interior Ministry.

The trial comes as the almost 3-year-long legal assault on Khodorkovsky's Yukos nears its conclusion. Yukos is now awaiting bankruptcy at the end of a case that marked a dramatic shift toward state control over the energy sector.

Chaired by deputy Kremlin chief of staff Igor Sechin, the man Khodorkovsky has accused of being the chief architect in the campaign against him, Rosneft is poised to cash in on its acquisition of Yugansk in what could be the biggest IPO in Russian history. Critics call the campaign, which has led to Khodorkovsky's incarceration in an east Siberian prison camp, politically motivated.

Pichugin's chief lawyer, Georgy Kaganer, says the Petukhov case will be nothing more than a show trial and part of a Kremlin PR drive to rebrand the Russian oil industry. "They are trying to blacken Yukos' name. They will try to show that Yukos is up to its ears in blood," he said in a recent interview.

But for Petukhov's widow, Farida, the trial is a chance, finally, to have her day in court after nearly eight years of stop-start investigations. The fact that the case has now come to trial, she says, is partly due to politics.

For her, and for other residents of Nefteyugansk, the trial has become a reckoning of sorts for the country's turbulent economic transition, as the town's oil fields moved from state to private hands, and back to the state again.

"This is not just a local case," Petukhova said in a recent interview in Kostina's Moscow office. "It shows how the system of state power works in Russia. It shows what we have lived through beginning from 1991 and how it happened."

After Petukhov was gunned down on the morning of June 26, 1998, on his daily walk to work, thousands of the town's residents took to the streets to protest his death. Residents immediately assumed Khodorkovsky was guilty, citing the mayor's tax battle with him and the fact that he was killed on Khodorkovsky's birthday.

Protesters hung banners out of the windows of the town administration that proclaimed, "Rosprom, Yukos, Menatep -- murderers! This blood is on your hands."

For many residents, Petukhov was a rare crusader. An oilman trained in the traditions of the Soviet era, he fought to defend citizens against the immense social upheaval that privatization brought. Under sweeping market reforms, the owners of major enterprises like Yugansk were freed from their social obligations, including the funding of schools and hospitals.

To make matters worse, Petukhova said, the new owners paid just a fraction of taxes they should have to the city. As the oil revenues disappeared into Menatep's vast web of trading structures, the town's budget deficit grew. Wages sometimes went unpaid for three months.

As the arrears mounted, so did Petukhov's standoff with Yukos management, as the company prepared to spin off the service companies that employed nearly 30,000 workers at Yugansk.

On May 27, a month before his death, Petukhov organized a rally outside Yugansk headquarters that disrupted the production unit's annual shareholders meeting. Then, on June 16, he wrote a letter to President Boris Yeltsin, Prime Minister Sergei Kiriyenko and State Duma leaders calling on the government to press criminal charges against Yukos for "concealing taxes in large quantities from 1996 to 1998."

In the letter, he also announced he was going on hunger strike to protest the "cynical actions and murderous politics carried out by oligarchs from Rosprom-Yukos and Bank Menatep in the Nefteyugansk region."

Ten days later, he was shot.

For MTResidents of Nefteyugansk protesting Petukhov's murder in 1998. Thousands took to the streets to demand justice.A New Breed of Oilman

Khodorkovsky and Petukhov had gotten off on the wrong foot from the start. They were from different worlds.

Soon after Bank Menatep won control over Yukos in the controversial loans-for-shares auctions, Khodorkovsky, a savvy young banker from Moscow, came to the town to learn how the drilling process worked.

Petukhov, an oilman born and bred with a doctorate in oil technology, was shocked, his widow recalled.

"This was something new: when the new owner of a major oil and gas complex had not even seen a well and how oil was extracted. This was a real eye-opener for the oilmen here," she said. "Petukhov ... told me he was frightened for the future of the town's oil industry."

"If someone does not know the worth of this work, then how can they run the oil and gas industry? What will happen to it?"

Making matters worse, she said, was that Khodorkovsky's Yukos security people were lobbying Petukhov to write off a Yukos debt of 450 billion nondenominated rubles owed to the town administration from 1995 before Menatep took over. In a complicated scheme, a large batch of oil intended for sale to pay off the taxes disappeared into the coffers of a trading firm, Rondo-S.

Yukos wanted the debt to disappear. Years later, during the tax evasion and fraud trial of Khodorkovsky and his business partner Platon Lebedev, some media close to the state, including NTV, claimed that Rondo-S belonged to a financier of Chechen rebel groups, Khozh-Akhmed Nukhayev, a former Chechen deputy prime minister under the separatist regime of Aslan Maskhadov. Prosecutors have named Nukhayev, whose whereabouts are unknown, as the organizer behind the July 2004 killing of U.S. journalist Paul Klebnikov.

Khodorkovsky's lawyer Anton Drel has denounced the media speculation, which first appeared a week after the Beslan school attack in September 2004, as part of a Kremlin campaign to smear Khodorkovsky's name.

Petukhova says that in those years she did not know anything about the firm's possible ties to Chechen rebels. "Yukos representatives came and tried to get him to write off a huge sum of money. My husband refused," she said. "This was the first reason" for the standoff, she said.

When the town's residents petitioned Yeltsin, Kiriyenko and parliamentary and regional leaders for a more thorough investigation into Petukhov's killing, and urged them to look into what happened to the money that disappeared through Rondo S, no information about any links with Nukhayev was forthcoming.

In fact, barely anything at all was forthcoming.

Petukhova said her appeals for a full investigation into her husband's murder fell on deaf ears. "For five years after the murder, I am sure there was no real investigation. There was only an investigation for show. Many employees of law enforcement agencies did not shy away from telling me, 'It's time to forget about this case.'"

"This is frightening," Petukhova said. "When law enforcement officers can say this, what kind of country are we living in?"

In those years, when the oligarchs had direct access to Yeltsin, even low-level Yukos officials liked to boast of their clout, Petukhova said.

When Petukhov was trying to force Yukos to pay more taxes, the Yukos security service in town "just laughed at us," Petukhova said. "They said, 'What world do you live in? We can have anyone we want fired in the presidential administration.'"

"They said Yukos handed out state jobs. They said they could kick the door of the presidential administration open with their foot," she said. "Such was their power."

Yukos' clout in the Yeltsin administration, Pichugin's lawyer Kaganer said, was a good reason why he thinks the current case against his client has been cooked up. "You understand the position Yukos held in Russia," he said. "If they needed to remove Petukhov from the position of mayor they could have found some reason to remove him. They didn't need to kill him."

An earlier investigation into the killing had already come up with witnesses who identified the men who pulled the trigger, Kaganer said. Now investigators have come up with different killers who will appear in the trial, he said. The previous "killers" that had been identified were, however, somehow killed, Kaganer said. He could not say what had happened to them.

Even Petukhova recognizes that the case against Pichugin might be political and that there might have been people other than those currently charged behind her husband's death. Petukhov could have made enemies on other fronts, too, as he made moves to clean up the city's market and other municipal facilities, she said.

But there was one big difference in the behavior of local criminal gangs and Yukos, she said. While the local crime bosses came to express their sympathies after the killing, from Yukos there was silence, she said.

"They didn't do anything," she said. "Khodorkovsky did not find the courage to come to me and say it was not him."

Kaganer said the fact that Yukos executives had not gone to talk to Petukhova after the killing didn't mean anything. "If you saw how Nefteyugansk was after the mayor was killed, not one person in his right mind would have gone there to express his sympathies. The whole community would have thrown themselves at you," he said.

'Brains Spilled Out'

When he heard of Petukhov's death, Khodorkovsky immediately canceled his birthday celebrations, Kaganer said.

Years later, the killing still appeared to disturb Khodorkovsky. He'd worked hard to improve his image with investors after a series of run-ins with minority shareholders in the late 1990s. From being well-known as the one of the roughest players in Russia's oil sector, by 2003 Khodorkovsky was seen as the guardian of western values and corporate governance standards.

In an interview with the Financial Times in summer 2003, published shortly after he was arrested that October, Khodorkovsky raised the matter himself. "I can say with absolute authority that no one in our company is involved in contract killings, or was involved in them in the past," Khodorkovsky told the paper. "There were no contract killings."

He recalled the day he got a phone call at 8 a.m. to tell him the mayor had been shot. "Is he alive?" the paper quoted Khodorkovsky as recalling, saying he still seemed stunned by the reply. "How could he be alive? A whole glassful of his brains has spilled out." It was an image, Khodorkovsky said, he would never forget.

Petukhova said the system Khodorkovsky helped create might have gotten out of hand. "It is hard to know the truth about what happened," she said. "There was a very terrifying security service working for Yukos. All the employees of Yugansk were frightened of it. No one talked about it there."

The security service, she said, had its tentacles in every branch of the town and regional authorities. "It was very big and highly paid. There were enough people to keep every person in town under their control, especially the top officials and businessmen," she said. "They would decide who would get a contract and who would not."

Alexei Kondaurov, a former KGB general in charge of Yukos' analytical department, said Petukhova was exaggerating. He said, however, that in those days Yukos was forced to build up its own powerful security service to defend its property against criminal gangs. "It was a battle for survival," he said. Any threat to Petukhov's life likely came from his links to criminal groups in the town, he said.

New Pressure

As the Kremlin's net has tightened around Yukos' former owners, once-stalled investigations have come back to haunt them.

Pichugin, 43, a former Federal Security Service official who ran Yukos' internal security service from 1994, is now on the receiving end of increasing state pressure. Last year, he was sentenced to 20 years in jail on charges of organizing the killing of Volgograd businessman Sergei Gorin and his wife, Olga, as well as for the attacks on Kostina and Viktor Kolesov, a senior official at Rosprom, as Menatep's financial industrial holding group was then named.

Critics say the evidence prosecutors came up with to win that case was circumstantial at best.

The bodies of the Gorins have never been found, and Pichugin's lawyers say they were staggered by their client's conviction when there was little proof the couple were actually dead. The rest of the case appeared to center on testimony from a convicted criminal, Igor Korovnikov, who said Gorin told him that if anything happened to him, Pichugin and the Yukos security service were behind it. Gorin apparently told Korovnikov him that he'd been organizing attacks on Pichugin's orders for years.

Kaganer said evidence like this would not have made it to the courts if the Russian justice system were independent. "This evidence would have been thrown out at the investigation stage," he said.

The new trial's credibility could also be undermined by reports that the prosecutors' case this time appears to hinge chiefly on the conviction won in last year's closed trial.

Pichugin's lawyers say the new charges against Pichugin are an attempt to pressure him into testifying against his old boss, Nevzlin. Nevzlin fled Russia for Israel soon after Pichugin was arrested in June 2003. Since then, prosecutors have unsuccessfully sought his extradition on charges he ordered the attacks and the killings. Nevzlin has denied all the charges.

The pressure on Pichugin has been intense, his lawyers say. "The aim is to break Pichugin so that he starts testifying. But he doesn't admit to anything."

The jailing of Khodorkovsky "is not enough for law enforcement agencies," Kondaurov said.

"They are the powers-that-be and when they don't get what they want, they are very upset."

The turnaround in Yukos' fortunes still stuns Petukhova.

The first indication the writing was on the wall for Khodorkovsky's empire came for her, she said, on Khodorkovsky's birthday in 2003. For the first time in years, she said, there was no mention of his birthday on national media. Lebedev's arrest came a few days later, on July 2.

"People here thought it was very strange. People always thought that they were running the country. ... For the first time, the myth disappeared," she said.

A tale of two oil towns

Nefteyugansk's residents have always drawn comparisons between their town and nearby Surgut, another oil town an hour's drive away across the River Ob.

In Nefteyugansk, the town was hit hard by tax minimization schemes used by Yukos, while tens of thousands of workers had their salaries slashed after their jobs were spun off to service companies.

Surgut, meanwhile -- the base for Kremlin-friendly oil company Surgutneftegaz -- was an oasis of tranquility and well-being in comparison. Taxes were paid and workers' salaries did not suffer, as Surgut's service companies remained within the oil firm.

"The fate of Surgut is completely different," said Alexander Bessonov, the head of Nefteyugansk's municipal heating enterprise who also serves as chairman of the City Duma's communal housing services committee. "The amount of oil extracted there is about the same, but the difference is huge."

On a visit to Surgut during his reelection campaign in early 2004, even President Vladimir Putin remarked on the difference between the two towns.

"Surgut and Nefteyugansk are as different as day and night," he said. "Here is an example of the businesses' attitudes toward the areas where they work." Some companies like Surgutneftegaz are good corporate citizens, while others, like Yukos, are irresponsible, he said.

For some in Nefteyugansk, the tax case against Khodorkovsky was a just response to Yukos' low tax payments in the 1990s.

Even though Khodorkovsky had been making considerable investments in social projects and improving corporate governance practices, residents still felt like conditions in Nefteyugansk were a long way behind those in Surgut.

When Rosneft president Sergei Bogdanchikov and his top production manager, Vladimir Bulba, flew into Nefteyugansk on New Year's Eve 2004 to take over Yugansk, residents hoped they would immediately raise living conditions to the level of those in Surgut.

Yet under Rosneft little has changed so far, some residents say.

"Nothing is being changed in the town even though Yugansk became a state company," Petukhova said. "It is now the most powerful production company in Rosneft's system. It was not only for this reason that it became a state company. ... We would like it to mobilize its forces to serve the Russian state."

Sergei Burov, Rosneft's candidate for mayor, who was also a senior manager at Yugansk when Yukos owned it, is promising changes for the better.

But his main rival, Galina Glukhova, a local journalist who has campaigned for justice in Petukhov's case, has been gathering support from workers discontented over the lack of changes since Rosneft took over.

The tax case against Khodorkovsky is "what Petukhov died for," Bessonov said. "He tried to make them pay taxes in full.

The trouble is, he added, that Rosneft has yet to show that it can offer a better future for the town.

"It is still minimizing wages in the service companies," Bessonov said.

Catherine Bolton, staff writer.
====
What Mrs Petukhova did not mention is that her own business was not very clear too, as by that time she was dealing the main town market with tchechen groups... so it's not so surprising that "local criminal band expressed their sympathies", they were indeed in friendly terms with the mayor's family
All the people who gave testimony against Yukos have been granted. For exemple, Kostina's husband is now a very important person in presidential administration.

Interfax : Havel, prominent Czechs sign letter of support for Khodorkovsky

2006-04-22T02:57:00.000+01:00

MOSCOW. April 21 (Interfax) - Former Czech president Vaclav Havel, Czech Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Vondra and 24 other prominent Czechs have signed an open letter declaring Mikhail Khodorkovsky a political prisoner and appealing for support for the former Yukos CEO.

The imprisonment of Khodorkovsky, who was "selectively convicted," was "the result of political manipulation," the Khodorkovsky Press Center website quoted the letter as saying.

The letter, which appeared in leading Prague newspapers on Wednesday, said Khodorkovsky had been jailed because he "openly expressed sympathy with the Russian political opposition" and criticized "the dubious economic views of the Kremlin."

The St. Petersburg Times : Oil Tycoon Khodorkovsky Transferred to One-Man Cell

2006-04-22T02:18:00.000+01:00

By Maria Danilova

Associated Press

MOSCOW — Oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky has been transferred to a one-man prison cell as part of the authorities’ campaign of intimidation against the man who was once Russia’s richest, his lawyer said Thursday.

Khodorkovsky’s transfer to the single-person cell Wednesday night came after an incident last week when another prisoner slashed him in the face while he slept.

Prison authorities said keeping Khodorkovsky away from other convicts at the Siberian prison where he is serving his sentence was needed for his personal safety.

Lawyer Yury Schmidt told reporters that his client was being punished.

“This is an attempt to demoralize, to discredit Khodorkovsky,” he said.

He said the move will deprive him of interacting with other people and taking advantage of prison facilities, such as the TV room.

“What (Khodorkovsky) was most afraid of was to be transferred to a one-man cell,” he said.

The founder of the Yukos oil company arrived at the prison camp in October to begin serving an eight-year sentence for tax evasion and fraud. Yukos — once Russia’s largest oil company— has been all but carved up by the state.

“Probably it didn’t seem enough for them; to give him eight years, to send him to the end of the world, to deprive him of normal human conditions ... they continue to be afraid of him,” Schmidt said.

The lawyer also said the slashing — which left Khodorkovsky with a relatively deep cut on his face and required stitches — was orchestrated by prison authorities, and he alleged that prison officials later found the attacker in possession of three knives.

A spokesman for the Federal Prison Service declined to comment on the allegations.

The St. Petersburg Times: Yukos Lawyer Gets 7 Year Term

2006-04-22T02:16:00.000+01:00

By Valeria Korchagina

Staff Writer

MOSCOW — Judges at Moscow’s Simonovsky District Court on Wednesday sentenced Svetlana Bakhmina, a former deputy head of Yukos’ legal department, to seven years in prison after finding her guilty of embezzlement and tax evasion.

A mother of two young children, Bakhmina, 36, is the latest in a series of several senior Yukos officials to be jailed since the company came under attack three years ago. Last year, the company’s former CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his business partner Platon Lebedev were handed sentences of eight years in prison on tax evasion and fraud charges.

The length of the prison term makes Bakhmina ineligible for release under a current amnesty for mothers sentenced to prison terms of six years or less.

“They did it on purpose, so the amnesty would not apply,” said Pavel Ivlev, a friend of Bakhmina’s and a lawyer with ties to Yukos who left Russia for New York in the fall of 2004, citing fears of prosecution. “This means that as well as the 1 1/2 years she has already been in jail, she will have to serve a minimum of 2 1/2 years more in jail” before becoming eligible for parole, Ivlev said.

The judges found Bakhmina guilty of embezzling some 8 billion rubles ($290 million) of assets belonging to Yukos subsidiary Tomskneft in the late 1990s. Bakhmina has denied the charges since her arrest on Dec. 8, 2004.

Judges on Wednesday refused to give Bakhmina a suspended sentence, which would have left her formally convicted but would free her from jail. Courts have the option of freeing mothers of young children on compassionate grounds. Bakhmina has two sons — Fyodor, 4, and Grigory, 8.

Ivlev said that he was sure that Bakhmina had done nothing wrong.

“Just because the system finds it unpleasant to acknowledge its mistakes, they decided that she should stay in jail,” Ivlev said.

Late Wednesday, there appeared to be some confusion regarding the kind of prison Bakhmina would be sent to.

In reading the sentence, the chief judge said Bakhmina was to be sent to a maximum-security prison. Prosecutor Nikolai Vlasov, who represented the Prosecutor General’s Office in the case, said later, however, that the judge should have said Bakhmina would be sent to a standard prison.

“I think a technical mistake took place and the court in fact sentenced her to standard imprisonment. The judge must have made a slip of the tongue,” Vlasov said, Interfax reported. He did not explain how he knew the contents of the verdict.

Vlasov said prosecutors would not dispute Wednesday’s ruling.

“I think that the court was able to sort out a complicated criminal case and made a fair decision,” he said.

Bakhmina’s defense team said it would appeal the verdict and the sentence.

“Of course we will appeal the verdict,” Bakhmina’s lawyer Olga Kozyreva told reporters after the verdict and sentence were delivered Wednesday, Interfax reported.

Throughout her detention and trial, Bakhmina argued that her position at Yukos had not given her the powers to make it possible for her to commit the crimes she was accused of.

In her final address to the court before the verdict was read out, Bakhmina pleaded with the judges to deliver a fair verdict. She also said that whatever she did while working at Yukos, she did it at the request of her superiors.

“I was not empowered to make any decision on my own. ... I did not have the power of attorney,” she told the judges, Interfax reported.

Bakhmina is the first woman to be jailed in the series of prosecutions against Yukos employees and executives that began in 2003.

Since Bakhmina’s detention, investigators have appeared to show little regard for the plight of her children. Last year, Bakhmina went on a hunger strike after her custodians in a Moscow pre-trial detention center refused to allow her to make paid telephone calls to her sons.

Ivlev on Wednesday called the authorities’ actions against Yukos and some of its employees a crime.

“All these people — people in the Kremlin, the judges, the investigators — are committing crimes. And it is they who should answer before the law,” Ivlev said by telephone.

A total of 35 people — Yukos owners, employees and subcontractors — have so far been charged, arrested or convicted, according to Khodorkovsky’s online press center. In the most recent development, prosecutors earlier this month arrested Vasily Aleksanyan, Bakhmina’s former boss at Yukos’ legal department. At the time of his arrest, Aleksanyan had just been appointed executive vice president and was the company’s most senior employee in Moscow.

BBC :| Yukos lawyer convicted of fraud

2006-04-22T02:13:00.000+01:00

A Russian court has sentenced a lawyer for embattled oil firm Yukos to seven years in prison for embezzlement.
Svetlana Bakhmina was arrested in 2004 and accused of asset-stripping at the firm's Tomskneft subsidiary.

Prosecutors have controversially sought a nine-year jail sentence for Mrs Bakhmina, who has two small children.

Yukos has been gradually dismantled amid a concerted state campaign against alleged corruption and tax evasion.

Ongoing battle

Former chief executive Mikhail Khordokovsky is serving an eight-year jail sentence in Siberia after being convicted of fraud and tax evasion. A district court has recently ruled that his continued solitary confinement was illegal.

Yukos' most senior Russian executive, Vasili Aleksanyan, was recently arrested and accused of money laundering.

The sentence was pronounced against Mrs Bakhmina by district court Judge Tatyana Korneyeva after reading out the lengthy verdict in court.

The Yukos employee was accused of stealing property worth $300m from Tomskneft, a former upstream unit which oversaw exploration, production and processing of oil.

Tomskneft assets were frozen in late 2004, months after Mr Khordokovsky was arrested.

Mrs Bakhmina, deputy head of the firm's Moscow legal department, has denied all the charges.

Bankruptcy threat

Yukos is currently trying to stave off bankruptcy, after a consortium of foreign banks accused it of defaulting on loan repayments.

Yukos' prinicipal assets have been seized and sold off over the past eighteen months after the authorities accused it of huge tax evasion and sought to recover $32bn.

Once one of Russia's most powerful employers, Yukos is a shadow of its former size, although it still produces 600,000 barrels of oil a day.

Yukos has accused the authorities of mounting an extra-judicial and politically motivated campaign against the firm.

Shmidt: Chita Jail Attack Part of Plot

2006-04-22T02:11:00.000+01:00

By Valeria Korchagina
Staff Writer

Schmidt speaking at a news conference Thursday. He said the knife attack on Khodorkovksy was part of a plot.

The knife attack on Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his transfer Wednesday to a single jail cell were part of a plot to force him into solitary confinement, his lawyer Yury Shmidt said Thursday.

Federal Prison Service officials said Wednesday that Khodorkovsky was transferred to a single cell for his own safety after having his nose cut last week in an attack by a fellow prisoner. He would have "all comforts, including a desk and a television set," officials said.

Shmidt, however, disputed prison officials' claims, saying that Khodorkovsky had in fact been moved to a cell in the Chita region prison's punishment block.

Prison authorities filmed Khodorkovsky's cell transfer, Shmidt said, citing another Khodorkovsky lawyer, Natalya Terekhova. The reason for the filming was not clear, but Shmidt suggested that the footage could end up being broadcast on national television as part of a state-sponsored program designed to give the impression that Khodorkovsky was doing well.

Shmidt said that Khodorkovsky had been in fear of being transferred to a single cell, as even small freedoms such as being able to walk from one room to another were much-valued in prison.

"Khodorkovsky has not felt and does not feel threatened while staying with other prisoners," Shmidt said. The only people Khodorkovsky could expect an attack from were far away, Shmidt said.

"He is expecting nasty stuff from [President Vladimir] Putin and [deputy Kremlin chief of staff Igor] Sechin. The rest are pawns and nobodies," Shmidt said.

Khodorkovsky last year accused Sechin, who also serves as chairman of Rosneft, of being the architect of the state's legal onslaught against Yukos.

Shmidt also lashed out at Western governments, accusing them of indifference to the fate of his client and the Yukos oil company he once headed.

"The West's behavior is shameful," Shmidt told journalists at a news conference. "Our liberties, our rights, were sold for a barrel of oil and a cubic meter of gas.

"I keep trying to speak out and journalists listen. But politicians stay silent. It feels like a voice in the wilderness."

Kommersant: Svetlana Bakhmina Gets Seven Years

2006-04-22T02:09:00.000+01:00

The Simonovsky Court in Moscow found deputy head of the YUKOS-Moscow legal department Svetlana Bakhmina guilty of embezzlement and tax evasion yesterday and sentenced her to seven years in prison. Judge Tatyana Korneeva began her seven-hour reading of the verdict in the case by saying that Bakhmina committed embezzlement in especially large volume (8 billion rubles) as part of a criminal group that consisted of her, former head of the YUKOS legal department Dmitry Gololobov and "persons unknown" in a scheme involving assets of YUKOS affiliate Tomskneft, which were sold to dummy companies belonging to YUKOS. The verdict repeated the findings of prosecutor Nikolay Vlasov practically word for word. A Tomskneft representative stated at the trial stated that no embezzlement had taken place and that the company has no claims against Bakhmina. Bakhmina was also accused of tax evasion for the nonpayment of 606,000 rubles' taxes on insurance annuities received in 2001 and 2002.
The court noted that Bakhmina did not acknowledge her guilt and "indicated that she worked under the leadership of Vasily Alexanyan [now a vice president of YUKOS, who was arrested April 7] and she also received instructions from Gololobov, she did not have the right to sign documents, she did not know anything about anyone's plans to embezzle the property of Tomskneft and she was never instructed to implement criminal plans. Tomskneft property was not entrusted to her, she did not manage it [property] and was not authorized in managerial issues. She did not pay taxes because insurance payments are not taxable." After that, the judge spent several hours listing the testimony of witness and contents of documents.

Many witnesses, even those for the prosecution, stated that Bakhmina, who was also a member of the Tomskneft board of directors, had no decisive role in company affairs and made no decisions. Her lawyers were clearly unprepared for the outcome of the case. The court, taking into account that Bakhmina is the mother of two small children, that she paid the tax arrears in the course of the trial, as well as the state of her health and general character, sentenced her to six and a half years' imprisonment for embezzlement and two years for tax evasion. It then found it possible to partially merge the sentences for a total of seven years. The court found no basis for amnesty.

Bakhmina listened to the verdict and sentence impassively. Her lawyers did not comment immediately after the conclusion of the hearing, but later promised to appeal the sentence. Prosecutor Vlasov called the court's verdict a “right decision” and said that it was "not the first or last" YUKOS case. The prosecution had asked for nine years' imprisonment. Gololobov, who is wanted in the same case, called the sentence “senseless and merciless.”

by Marina Lepina, Vladislav Trifonov

TIME.magazine: Is an Imprisoned Russian Oil Tycoon the Victim of KGB Tactics? -- Page 1

2006-04-22T02:05:00.000+01:00

A vicious prison assault on Mikhail Khodorkovsky bears the hallmarks of Soviet-era tactics, says one man who should know

By YURI ZARAKHOVICH/MOSCOW

The Kremlin may have hoped that by jailing Mikhail Khodorkovsky on tax evasion charges, they would eliminate any political challenge represented by the oil tycoon. Instead, the prison experience may be honing Khodorkovsky's credentials as a future challenger to President Putin — and, say his lawyer and a former KGB man who worked for his oil company, prompting the authorities to resort to some old Soviet tricks to stop him.

Khodorkovsky could be forgiven for feeling like he'd been thrust back into the Soviet gulag: Sentenced to eight years in a Siberian labor camp at Krasnokamensk, Khodorkovsky has been denied access to any intellectual activity. Access to books has been denied, and television is available only in the facility's recreation room, where other prisoners prefer watching soap operas. Khodorkovsky spends every day from 6am till 10pm doing senseless manual labor and taking courses on glove-stitching. He is under constant monitoring by a team sent from Moscow of officials from the prisons department and the FSB (the security service that succeeded the KGB). He has twice been locked in solitary confinement, once for being in possession of a copy of camp regulations published in a newspaper, and once for having a cup of tea with Alexander Kuchma, 22, occupant of the neighboring bed in his 100-person barrack. These charges, says Khodorkovsky lawyer Yuri Schmidt, enable the authorities to deny the prisoner a more lenient regime and eventual parole. (Indeed, state prosecutors still threaten to press money laundering charges that could add another decade to Khodorkovsky's prison term.) But on Wednesday, a Krasnokamensk court ruled his first lockdown unlawful, and his lawyers are appealing the second charge.

Khodorkovsky's prison experience turned bloody last Friday at 3am, when Kuchma slahed the tycoon's nose with a cobbler's knife. "I wanted to cut his eye out," Kuchma acknowledged, when interrogated by the camp administration on the assault. "But my hand slipped." Kuchma said he assaulted Khodorkovsky, because he was afraid of an imminent transfer to a different barrack, where he would have been in trouble with other prisoners — he hoped the assault would result in his being placed in solitary confinement until the transfer situation dissipates. (After the assault, he was indeed sent to solitary confinement for ten days. A source in the Federal Penitentiary Agency (FSIN) told the Interfax wire agency that afterwards Kuchma would be transferred to another penal colony. Khodorkovsky referred to Kuchma as 'unstable.'

FSIN Director Yuri Kalinin immediately denied that the knifing had occurred. He insisted that Khodorkovsky's wounds had been sustained in a brawl with Kuchma. Then, five days later, Kalinin blamed Khodorkovsky for the assault. "Now I can say that Khodorkovsky to a certain extent has provoked this situation himself," Kalinin told the press. "He should not have grown so attached to young prisoners, brought them so close to himself, or been so affectionate to them." Kalinin ordered Khodorkovsky into solitary confinement 'to ensure his own safety. Following Kalinin's insinuations, the Interfax wire agency quoted an unnamed FSIN source as saying that Kuchma had submitted a written statement accusing Khodorkovsky of sexual harassment. Comments Schmidt: "They have cynically used the assault at Khodorkovsky to isolate him under the excuse of protection, and apply Soviet tactics of character assassination."

One expert in Soviet-era prison tactics sees a familiar pattern in the assault on Khodorkovsky. Alexei Kondaurov, a retired KGB major-general, a former official of Khodorkovsky's oil company, Yukos, and current member of the Russian legislature, recalls how other convicts, often mentally unstable, were recruited as agents and placed around a target prisoner. They don't need orders to assault a prisoner singled out by the administration for harsh treatment, Kondaurov says. â€œThey just do it to seek lenience and rewards.â€œ

One reason for turning the screws on Khodorkovsky may be that in prison, his political star seems to be rising. Recent opinion polls have shown growing sympathy for Khodorkovsky even among sections of the public that had previously dismissed him simply as another unscrupulous oligarch. "The Kremlin fears that Khodorkovsky will emerge from prison to unite left and right democratic opposition groups,â€œ Kondaurov speculates. If so, Khodorkovsky may be in grave danger: â€œHe'll either walk out of the camp as the winner,â€œ says Kondaurov. â€œOr they'll carry him out feet first."

His persecution may have actually helped Khodorkovsky's image in the eyes of ordinary Russians. Unlike other oligarchs who went abroad with the billions they'd amassed during the Yeltsin years, the Yukos tycoon returned to face a crooked trial and prison. In many an eye, that may have transformed him from yet another sleazy oligarch into the latter-day equivalent of that Soviet-era icon of dissent: a prisoner of conscience. "The Kremlin has done free campaigning for him," quips legislator Alexei Mitrophanov.

Now 42, Khodorkovsky may return to Russian society in his prime at 50, toughened by his experience and hungry for action. A charismatic, enlightened, modern and fearless leader, the like of which Russia has never seen, may indeed emerge. If he survives the camps, that is.

Reuters: Khodorkovsky not charging attacker

2006-04-17T14:49:00.000+01:00

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Jailed Russian oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky will not press criminal charges against a cellmate who attacked him with a knife, Interfax news agency quoted one of his legal team as saying on Sunday.

The tycoon's lawyer said he needed stitches after a fellow inmate at his Siberian prison camp slashed him with a cobbler's knife while he slept. Prison authorities said no knife was involved and Khodorkovsky just had a scratch on his nose.

"Khodorkovsky has refused to press criminal charges against the person who wounded him," Interfax quoted one of his lawyers, Natalya Terekhova, as saying. "We will respect his wishes."

Founder of the YUKOS oil company and once Russia's richest man, Khodorkovsky is serving eight years for fraud and tax evasion.

He says he was framed by enemies in the Kremlin who felt he was becoming too powerful. Officials say he is a corrupt businessman who was convicted in a fair trial.

Terekhova said Khodorkovsky had been moved out of the prison sick bay and back into the barracks he shares with dozens of other inmates.

Khodorkovsky's supporters say they believe the Kremlin is trying to break his spirit and was behind the assault, though they have produced no hard evidence to support this.

"In the prison everything is observed around the clock and without an order from above such an attack would not be possible," Germany's Focus magazine quoted Leonid Nevzlin, one of Khodorkovsky's closest business partners, as saying.

"Even before this, everything was done to make Khodorkovsky's life in jail a hell," Focus quoted Nevzlin as saying in its online edition.

Prison officials said the attack, on Thursday night, was the result of an argument between Khodorkovsky and his cellmate.

Khodorkovky's 2003 arrest and a legal assault on his company alarmed many investors. It also strengthened a view in the West that President Vladimir Putin was clamping down on political and economic freedoms.

Investor confidence has since bounced back, helped by vibrant stock markets and high prices for Russia's main exports, oil and gas.

(Additional reporting by Erik Kirschbaum in Berlin)

AP - Jailed tycoon recovering after slashing by inmate

2006-04-17T14:46:00.000+01:00

MOSCOW (AP) - Jailed Russian tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky has been hospitalized after another prisoner slashed him in the face while he slept, his lawyer said Saturday.
Yury Schmidt said the prisoner used a sharp object in the attack, which occurred sometime between Thursday night and Friday morning.

The billionaire tycoon, once Russia's richest man, required stitches and was recovering in the Siberian prison's infirmary wing, Schmidt said.

Khodorkovsky, imprisoned since October, is serving an eight-year sentence for tax evasion and fraud. His Yukos oil empire was carved up by the state.

AP via Buffalo News

The Moscow Times: Inmate Slashes Khodorkovsky's Nose

2006-04-17T14:42:00.000+01:00

By Valeria Korchagina and Catherine Belton
Staff Writers

Yukos founder Mikhail Khodorkovsky's nose was slashed early Friday by a fellow inmate while Khodorkovsky slept in a barracks in the Krasnokamensk prison colony he has been confined to for the last six months, his lawyers said.

A former prison officer in Krasnokamensk attributed the knifing to a change in the power structure at the prison, suggesting the attack was not orchestrated by state officials, as Khodorkovsky's lawyers implied may have been the case.

Still, there was uncertainty late Sunday surrounding the attack. Khodorkovsky, once the country's richest man, is serving an eight-year term in the Chita region prison after a highly politicized investigation and trial.

While Russian prisons are notorious for violence and lack of order, Khodorkovsky continues to rankle senior state officials, who are believed to have initiated the campaign against Khodorkovsky in the first place.

"I assume there are enough people within the official establishment who are frustrated by Khodorkovksy not having shown any hint of weakness," Khodorkovsky's lawyer Yury Schmidt said by telephone Sunday. "There are plenty of ways to turn one's life into hell."

Schmidt stopped short of calling the attack an assassination attempt. "The aim is unclear," he said. "It could have been done to cause pain or to mutilate."

Nikolai Moshchanits, the former prison officer, who formerly ran the prison football team and a production line where prisoners made clothes, said by telephone Sunday that Khodorkovsky's attack had been ordered by a new smotryashchy, or criminal boss, who took over the colony a few months ago. The attack, Moshchanits added, was meant to be a "provocation."

"He wanted to show to the prison authorities who was boss," Moshchanits said. "There was no danger to Khodorkovsky's life." Khodorkovsky was chosen, he said, because he was the penal colony's highest-profile inmate.

Moshchanits said the incident had been closely watched by prison officials across the country.

"A commission from Chita has already arrived, and one from Moscow is expected too. They will punish the prison officials and may even fire some. The reaction will be adequate," he said.

Natalya Terekhova, Khodorkovsky's Krasnokamensk lawyer, would not speculate on the motive behind the attack. "I am sure it is not related to any criminal activities," she said Sunday by telephone. "There has never been any reason for Khodorkovsky to be involved and there would not be."

Khodorkovsky woke early Friday with his face covered in blood, Terekhova said. "He did not see the attacker," she said. "He got up and ran to the mirror to figure out what happened. He then alerted the inmate in charge of the barrack, who in turn informed a prison officer on duty."

Khodorkovsky was taken into the colony's medical unit, where a dentist who also handles facial injuries stitched up a gash on Khodorkovsky's left nostril.

Terekhova said it became clear shortly after the incident that it was a fellow inmate who was responsible for the knifing. The lawyer referred to the inmate as Kuchma, adding that she did not know his first name. Kuchma, 23, first made it into the news in mid-March after he and Khodorkovsky were punished for drinking tea in a place deemed inappropriate by authorities.

Khodorkovsky is not planning to take legal action against the prisoner, whom Russian media Saturday inexplicably called Khodorkovsky's "young friend." In Russian, the term connotes a sexual relationship.

Terekhova said Sunday that she had seen Khodorkovsky on Saturday afternoon and that the cut looked well taken care of by the doctor and did not appear to be causing much discomfort.

Prison officials on Saturday tried to downplay the incident, saying that Kuchma and Khodorkvosky were involved in a fight that prompted Kuchma to "scratch" Khodrokovsky's nose.

"An investigation is under way, but most likely there was some sort of unpleasant situation during which the young inmate scratched Khodorkovsky's nose," a Federal Prison Service official told Interfax on Saturday. More official information was expected to be released on Monday.

But Khodorkovsky's defense lawyers were unimpressed, expressing outrage that after the attack authorities were thought to have discovered another knife and a razor blade in Kuchma's possession.

"One of the main arguments given by the authorities to justify Khodorkovsky's move to Krasnokamensk was that it would be safer for him," Anton Drel, also a Khodorkovsky lawyer, said.

Drel said Khodorkovsky's lawyers had hoped that the authorities would make sure their client was safe, but he said authorities did not appear serious about protecting him. While Khodorkovsky is routinely searched and monitored, Drel said, other prisoners appear to enjoy much more freedom inside the prison walls.

"He is not safe there," Drel said. "Other inmates probably see that justice is very selectively applied and feel that they can behave accordingly."

On Sunday, some of Khodorkovsky's supporters also voiced fears for his life.

"It was a well-planned attack," said Novaya Gazeta journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who is known for her coverage of Chechnya. "There had been rumors circulating that something like that could have happened. The Kremlin is tired of having a convict filing complaints for every violation committed against him. After this attack, the Kremlin hopes that [Khodorkovsky] will calm down."

Khodorkovsky's former business partner Leonid Nevzlin, who left Russia for Israel in the fall of 2003 fearing prosecution, also appeared to have little doubt that the attack was ordered from on high.

"The Russian regime has stooped to a new low. First, they hold a show trial. Then, they throw Khodorkovsky in a remote Siberian prison, where he is being held in appalling conditions. Then, they try to eliminate him physically by exposing him to danger," Nevzlin said in an e-mailed statement Sunday.

"These tactics demand the attention of Amnesty International and the International Committee of the Red Cross," he said.

The attack came as the government onslaught against Yukos nears a crucial endgame. As the company enters bankruptcy proceedings, the oil firm's reputation is soon to be put to a new test in a trial against the oil firm's security chief, Alexei Pichugin, over the murder of the former mayor of Nefteyugansk and other attempted murders; the trial is weeks away.

Pichugin has already been sentenced to 20 years in prison for a double contract killing and a series of other attacks after a trial last year that was closed to the public. This time, prosecutors have decided that the public should hear the full details of Yukos executives' alleged crimes. The new murder trial will be open to the public.

Staff Writer Francesca Mereu contributed to this report.

Kommersant: Khodorkovsky Got under the Knife

2006-04-17T14:32:00.000+01:00

Russia’s jailed tycoon, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was attacked by another convict, Khodorkovsky’s lawyer announced. A young prisoner with whom the former oligarch and ex-CEO of YUKOS used to share dietary, plank bed and even a place in the lockup, tried to cut off Khodorkovsy’s nose by using a sharp object. The lawyers say the convict warmed his way in Khodorkovsky’s confidence to kill him. As to the Federal Prison Service, they don’t doubt it was just an ordinary brawl of two prisoners.

The statement of Mikhail Khodorkovsky's lawyer, Yury Schmidt, that his client was attacked early April 14, had a penetrating wound and was hospitalized was the hot news of nearly all world agencies past weekend. It turned out later on the wound of Khodorkovsky wasn’t tragically penetrating and it was treated by the medical attendant at Krasnokamensk penal colony, where once Russia’s richest man is serving his eight-year sentence.

“Mikhail Borisovich woke up because of the violent pain in the face” roughly at 5:00 a.m. Friday, said another lawyer of Khodorkovsky Natalia Terekhova. “He touched his face. Having felt it was wet, he switched on the light and looked at himself in the mirror. He saw the blood and woke up the household manager, who called an operating officer on duty at colony.”

Khodorkovsky was attacked by his neighbor, Kuchma, 23, who was condemned for petty stealing. The weapon was the sharpened stem of the spoon. Kuchma said he wanted to poke an eye out of Khodorkovsky but his hand trembled in the last moment.

Khodorkovsky declined to submit a complaint, saying Kuchma “didn’t know what he was doing.”

New-York Times: Russian Oil Tycoon Is Slashed in Face in Siberian Prison - New York Times

2006-04-17T14:28:00.000+01:00

MOSCOW, April 15 — Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, the jailed oil tycoon, was slashed in the face on Friday in a Siberian prison colony, his lawyers said Saturday.

The injury was not life-threatening, one of his lawyers, Yuri Schmidt, said in a telephone interview, but it raised fresh issues about Mr. Khodorkovsky's safety in a remote prison camp.

Mr. Khodorkovsky, Russia's most famous inmate, awoke during the night and found his face bloodied and cut, Mr. Schmidt said. The wound was stitched closed at the infirmary in the prison in Chita, where he is serving an eight-year sentence.

A knife and another blade were later found in a search of the possessions of an inmate suspected in the attack. Mr. Schmidt said he did not yet know all of the circumstances of the slashing, but that as far as he knew the prison service had not opened a criminal investigation.

He added that he was concerned that the attack had been premeditated by unspecified interests. "I assume that there is something behind this," he said.

The Federal Penal Service did not return several phone calls. Its spokesman was quoted by the Interfax news agency disputing Mr. Schmidt's version, saying that Mr. Khodorkovsky had quarreled with an inmate and "the young convict scratched Khodorkovsky's nose."

Once Russia's richest man, Mr. Khodorkovsky was the founder and head of the Yukos oil company and a sharp critic of the Kremlin.

His conviction last year, on charges including tax evasion and fraud, capped a long-running trial that his supporters said was a politically motivated campaign to silence challengers to President Vladimir V. Putin and to consolidate the Kremlin's hold over Russia's energy resources.

Yukos has been heavily damaged by tax charges and the forced sale of its richest oil fields, which are now owned by Rosneft, the state-controlled oil company. What is left of Yukos is in bankruptcy proceedings in Russian court.

Supporters of Mr. Khodorkovsky have long said they fear for his safety. He has been held since his arrest in 2003 and was moved to the prison camp last fall. Another of his lawyers, Robert Amsterdam, said by telephone that Russia had failed to protect him.

Russia's authorities, he said, "are not in any way achieving their duties to protect those they have incarcerated."

"We fear exactly this kind of targeting," he said. "He is a terribly exposed individual."

By C. J. CHIVERS
Published: April 16, 2006

Kommersant: YUKOS Vice-President Arrested 5 Days after the Appointment

2006-04-08T01:41:00.000+01:00

The Prosecutor General’s office detained Vasily Alexanyan yesterday, five days after he had been appointed vice-president of YUKOS. He was determined to get the company back under the control of Steven Theede, YUKOS’ president who is now abroad.

Mr. Alexanyan was arrested after the court upheld the prosecutors’ speculation that he had been involved in embezzlement of 12 billion rubles at Eastern Oil Company and Tomskneft and the money laundry.
The prosecutors had to file a petition with the court since Vasily Alexanyan had been an attorney and could be charged only after a court sanction.

The court sided with the prosecutors who can now indict Vasily Alexanyan, the former head of the legal department of YUKOS. The official is suspected of embezzling property and stocks of Eastern Oil Company and its subsidiary, Tomskneft, worth of 12 billion rubles, as well as money laundry. Devorg Dangyan noted that the prosecutors virtually copied the accusations leveled against Svetlana Bakhmina, the deputy head of the legal department of YUKOS.

Vasily Alexanyan was arrested at his friend’s apartment in downtown Moscow and taken to the investigation department of the Prosecutor General’s Officer for an interrogation.

Mr. Alexanyan was appointed vice-president of YUKOS on April 1 and strove to reorganize the management structure of the oil company after two subsidiaries of the company refused to subordinate to the London office.

Mr. Aleksanyan called the charges leveled by the prosecutors unfounded and noted that they are mainly based on Svetlana Bakhmina’s testimony. “There’s nothing but the testimony here. I am sure that they promised a more lenient penalty for her in return for the evidence. I am not judging her – she’s a mother of two children after all. There can’t be a choice in this case.”

The interrogation of the former YUKOS vice-president lasted well after 9 p.m. last night. Aleksanyan’s lawyer, Devorg Davgyan told the press later that the state investigator charged his client with embezzlement and money laundry. Mr. Aleksanyan was sent to a detention center yesterday, and the Basmanny Court is to consider the prosecutor’s application for his formal arrest today.

by Vladislav Trifonov
===
See also: Shocking pictures of the arrest

AFP: Yukos executive arrested, Khodorkovsky stays in Siberia

2006-04-08T01:30:00.000+01:00

Prosecutors arrested Vasily Aleksanyan, acting vice president of the beleaguered Russian oil firm Yukos, while a court rejected a bid by Yukos founder Mikhail Khodorkovsky to move closer to Moscow from his remote Siberian prison.

The NTV television showed policemen pinning Aleksanyan to the floor and screaming "Down!" at him after having broken through his apartment's door.

After Aleksanyan, visibly shocked, was shown escorted to the prosecutor general's office.

"They brought (my client) this evening to the preventive detention center on the Petrovka street. He denied the accusations brought against him as absurd and told me that he intended to declare a hunger strike," his lawyer Gevorg Davgyan said.

Aleksanyan had said previously he expected to be charged with embezzlement and money laundering, allegations which he described as "absurd".

The prosecutor general's office confirmed Aleksanyan's arrest.

"Aleksanyan is under arrest as a suspect and is presently giving a statement to the prosecutor general," Interfax news agency quoted a prosecutor's spokesman as saying.

Davgyan said his client could be held for up to 48 hours as a suspect but his detention could be prolonged if charges are filed against him.

Meanwhile, a Moscow court rejected Khodorkovsky's request to be moved from the penetentiary at Chita in eastern Siberia, to a jail closer to Moscow where he can be closer to his family.

Khodorkovsky, was arrested in 2003 and sentenced last year to eight years in following a landmark trial watched closely as a litmus test of everything from judicial reform to investor's rights and Kremlin economic policy.

Khodorkovsky, once Russia's wealthiest person with fortune believed to exceed 15 billion dollars, was convicted on charges of embezzlement, massive fraud and tax evasion.

On Tuesday, Khodorkovsky's lawyer, Yuri Schmidt accused authorities of seeking to destroy his client physically at the grim prison colony, where he has twice been sentenced to solitary confinement for offenses such as drinking tea in the wrong place and possessing a copy of the ministry of justice directive on the rights of prisoners.

Critics accuse the regime of President Vladimir Putin of persecuting Khodorkovsky in an attempt to reestablish control of the state over Russia's oil reserves and sidelining someone considered too independent and politically ambitious.

The Kremlin has strongly rejected those accusations, saying the case against the company and its founder was strictly an effort to prosecute large-scale crimes.

The Yukos board, in an effort to regain control over the firm's legal assets in Russia, appointed Aleksanyan only on Tuesday to take over the firm. He was the former head of Yukos' legal department.

"It is no coincidence that the arrest concerns the person who was appointed to go to court to stop the pillage," said Yukos chairman, Steven Theede, a US citizen, who is based in London with most other members of the company's management-in-exile.

Theede has been barred from entering Russia and is in conflict with the Moscow-based management which, according to Russian media reports, favors the rapid and total dismantlement of the remainder of the Yukos oil empire.

The company's crown jewel, the oil production unit Yuganskneftegaz, was sold at auction in December 2004 in what the state said was an effort to recuperate back taxes owed by the company for several years valued at more than 20 billion dollars.

The Yugansk unit was snapped up by a never-before-heard-of group, which promptly turned around and sold it to the state-run oil giant Rosneft.

AFP via Turkishpress

Kommersant: New YUKOS Vice President Has His Say

2006-04-06T01:34:00.000+01:00

Court decides the fate of Vasily Alexanyan today

The conflict between the Moscow and London offices of YUKOS has moved to the front office. New executive vice president Vasily Alexanyan is threatening to reorganize the company's management structure so that he could manage its subsidiaries, with the exception of YUKOS RM (refining and marketing) and YUKOS EP (exploration and production), whose managements refuse to subordinate themselves to him. Alexanyan may succeed in his plans, which he announced yesterday, if he is not prevented from doing do by the court, which is to rule on elements of crime in his actions today, or law enforcement, which conducted searches of his apartment and suburban home right after he made his announcement.

Alexanyan said that the lack of information from the company' subsidiaries that has arisen from the conflict from the company's London and Moscow offices could reduce the value of the company's stock, thus bringing it closer to bankruptcy, and complicate life for temporary manager Eduard Rebgun, who is to present a plan to the court and YUKOS creditors by June 27 to settle the company's problems. He added that the problem with YUKOS RM and YUKOS EP, which take orders only from the company's London office “can be solved in a second” and that it would be known by the end of the week whether changes will be made in the company's management structure. Alexanyan was appointed executive vice president with the authority of president of the company on April 1. He had previously been a member of the legal team for main YUKOS shareholder Group MENATEP and head of the YUKOS legal department before that.

Alexanyan said that YUKOS Oil Co. has become a holding company and has practically no independent economic activity. The management of its subsidiaries are formally subordinate not to the president of YUKOS but to the management of YUKOS RM and YUKOS EP, whose managers are not executives of YUKOS Oil Co. Alexanyan said that that structure was untenable in a corporate conflict, mentioning that YUKOS RM head Anatoly Nazarov refuses to speak to him or provide requested information.

YUKOS temporary manager Rebgun told Kommersant yesterday that he will not become involved in the conflict. Nazarov was unavailable for comment.

by Anna Skornyakova, Olga Pleshanova, Evgeny Alexeev

Khodorkovsky again placed in punitive ward

2006-03-17T22:42:00.000Z

MOSCOW. March 17 (Interfax) - Former Yukos head Mikhail Khodorkovsky has once again been placed in a punitive ward at the penal colony where he is serving his term, Khodorkovsky's website reported, citing his lawyer, Natalya Terekhova.
"Khodorkovsky was again placed in a punitive ward at the Krasnokamensk penal colony at 9:00 a.m. today," reads a report posted on Khodorkovsky's website.
The official explanation for the punishment is that Khodorkovsky "dined not at a place specially designed for this."
At about 9:00 p.m. on March 15, Khodorkovsky returned to the barracks from a meeting with his lawyer, Karina Moskalenko. "Then he and another convict started drinking tea at the unit council room. An officer on duty caught them right at the moment they were committing this criminal deed," the report says.
"As a result, Khodorkovsky and the other convict were placed into the same punitive ward cell for seven days," the report says.
Lawyer Moskalenko confirmed told Interfax that Khodorkovsky was placed in a punitive ward "for absolutely farfetched reasons."
Moskalenko said Khodorkovsky had told her that "the colony administration has fabricated one more accusation."
Khodorkovsky's lawyers will appeal the decision in court once again, she said.
Meanwhile, lawyer Yury Shmidt said he believes "placing Khodorkovsky in a punitive ward was absolutely unlawful."
"I am continuing to insist that the administration of the penal colony YaG 14/10 has been instructed to punish Khodorkovsky on any pretext and without such, because punishments might prevent his transfer to relaxed conditions and might in the future be an obstacle for Khodorkovsky to request a parole," the website quoted Shmidt as saying.
"The colony administration has illegally deprived Khodorkovsky of meetings with his lawyers during working hours," Shmidt said.
"So as not to lose time, Mikhail Borisovich [Khodorkovsky] had no choice but skip a supper to meet with his lawyers. And it would be inhuman to deprive him of the right to drink a cup of tea before going to bed, even if the regulations did not allow this," Shmidt said.
"It is absolutely clear that such a 'violation' deserved no more than an oral reprimand," he said.

Interfax

Russia Freezes Assets of Jailed Oil Tycoon's Rights Group - New York Times

2006-03-17T22:31:00.000Z

By C. J. CHIVERS

MOSCOW, March 17 — The bank accounts of a foundation led by the imprisoned Russian businessman, Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, were frozen by court order today, the foundation and its bank said, a move that strongly suggests the organization is about to be shut down by the Russian government.

The foundation, Open Russia, immediately announced that it was forced to suspend its activities promoting civil society, and accused Russia of extending its crackdown on nongovernment organizations.

"It seems that they are trying to stop all of our activities because, of course, without money we can do nothing," said Irina Yasina, the vice chairman of the foundation's board.

The court action follows a general crackdown in Russia on nongovernment organizations that receive foreign funding, all of which will be subject next month to a law signed in January restricting their activities.

Although Open Russia is a domestic group, the new provisions had seemed tailored to include it, as a clause in the law extends the restrictions to organizations founded by citizens convicted of crimes.

Mr. Khodorkovsky, the founder of the Yukos oil company, started Open Russia in 2001. Once Russia's wealthiest man, he was convicted of fraud and others charges last year, and is serving an eight-year prison term in Siberia. He and his supporters claim the charges against him were a retaliation contrived by the Kremlin as punishment for his political activities.

Open Russia, which claims to be the country's largest foundation, has supported human rights and political freedoms in Russia, in part by providing grants to partner organizations throughout the country. It had planned an annual budget of $11 million this year and maintained its accounts at the Trast national bank, Ms. Yasina said.

Its activities have been the subject of intense government interest, including a raid on its offices here last fall, and at least five tax inspections last year, Ms. Yasina said. Today much of the suspense about Russia's intentions ended.

A spokesman for Trast, Dmitry V. Chukseyev, said that an official from the General Prosecutor's office arrived in the morning with a court order stipulating that the accounts had been frozen "in relation to a criminal matter against Khodorkovsky, Lebedev and other unidentified people."

The order, Mr. Chukseyev said, "immobilizes any movements of money" without the prosecutors' approval. It did not make clear the nature of the criminal activity, Mr. Chukseyev said. Russia's General Prosecutor's office made no public statement about the case.

Mr. Khodorkovsky remains the chairman of the board of Open Russia. The court order's mention of Lebedev referred to Platon Lebedev, Mr. Khodorkovsky's business associate, with whom he was convicted.

Mr. Yasina said the accounts contained several million dollars, and the assets were frozen on a day that Open Russia had planned to distribute funds to organizations it helps underwrite.

She excoriated the prosecutor for moving against the foundation, saying that it was another example of Russia backsliding on human rights and civil society at a time when it holds the rotating chairmanship of the Group of Eight industrialized nations.

The court order also arrived on the same day that Mr. Khodorkovsky's supporters said he had been sentenced to serve a week in a punitive cell because he had been drinking tea outside an approved prison area. Russia's prison service could not be reached by telephone this evening.

The action against the foundation were unexpected but not entirely surprising. Almost all aspects of Mr. Khodorkosvky's business and public activities have faced government pressure since his arrest in 2003.

His oil company is in ruins, after being drained of assets by enormous tax judgments against it and having its core business auctioned off by the Russian authorities. Mr. Khodorkovsky himself still has several years to serve on his prison term.

Ms. Yasina said the events today signaled to her that Open Russia, like Yukos, would not survive in Russia.

"Now it is absolutely clear," she said. "I had some hope, even today in the morning. Now I understand that we are stopped."

The New York Times, 3.17.2006

Theede has no Russian work permit

2006-03-17T10:38:00.000Z

MOSCOW. March 17 (Interfax) - Yukos president, U.S. citizen Steven
Theede has no permission to work in Russia, the Russian Federal
Migration Service told Interfax on Friday.
"Nobody by the name of Steven Theede has been included in the
database of foreign citizens with permission to work in the Russian
Federation," an official source from the Migration Service said.
He said that "Steven Theede has never applied to the Federal
Migration Service to receive permission to work in Russia, otherwise he
would be in the database."
Consequently, according to Russian law, this foreigner does not
have the right to work in Russia.
On Thursday evening Yukos (RTS: YUKO) distributed a statement that
Steven Theede is legally the president of Yukos.
"Following recent press reports indicating that the Federal
Migration Service is questioning Mr. Steven Theede's authority as
President of Yukos Oil Company as a result of him not possessing a
Russian Work Permit, the Company states: Mr. Theede carries out his
duties as President of Yukos Oil Company outside of Russia and Russian
law does not prevent such an arrangement," the statement said.
"Under Russian law Mr. Theede's powers and duties as Yukos
President were conferred upon him in strict compliance with Russian
Civil Code and the Law on Joint Stock Companies. The authorities vested
in him are conferred by the Board of Directors of Yukos. To this end,
the issues relating to Mr. Theede's Visa and/or Work Permit are purely a
matter of administrative law rather than corporate law and their absence
do not affect his ability to carry out his duties with the complete
authority vested in him by the Board of Directors under corporate law,"
the statement said.
Theede has been company president since summer 2004, before which
he held various positions at Yukos.

Interfax

Millions in Yukos Debt Acquired

2006-03-15T22:34:00.000Z

MOSCOW, March 15 — The Russian state oil company Rosneft has acquired $482 million in debt that the troubled oil company Yukos owed to Western banks, Yukos said Wednesday. The step raised the possibility that Rosneft might acquire Yukos's remaining assets.

In a statement on its Web site, Yukos said it appeared that Rosneft acquired the debt in December.

Neither Rosneft nor the Western banks confirmed the sale. A spokesman for Rosneft could not be reached late Wednesday.

Rosneft has already acquired Yukos's richest oil fields and with Yukos in official disfavor and teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, energy analysts speculated that Rosneft might gain possession of at least some of the Yukos assets used as collateral on the debt.

But Rosneft denied as recently as Monday that it was interested in acquiring the rest of Yukos, and some analysts said the purchase of the debt might be an attempt by Rosneft to clean up its books before an initial public stock offering it plans later this year.

"Rosneft wants to make its debt structure as clean as possible and remove any uncertainties ahead of its I.P.O.," Chris Weafer, chief strategist at Alfa Bank in Moscow, told Bloomberg News. "It also puts Rosneft in a better position for assets that may be shaken from Yukos under bankruptcy."

A consortium of 14 Western banks, including Deutsche Bank, ING, Citigroup and BNP Paribas, filed suit in Moscow on Friday to have Yukos declared bankrupt. Yukos also faces tax claims and other lawsuits.

Rosneft, a second-tier producer in the 1990's, became a major oil company when rich fields in western Siberia were seized from Yukos by Russian tax authorities in a politically charged case in 2004. Yukos's former chairman, Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, is serving an eight-year sentence in a Siberian penal colony after conviction on fraud, embezzlement and tax-evasion charges.

Rosneft hopes to raise $20 billion on Russian and foreign exchanges from its stock offering. The Kremlin intends to retain 51 percent of the company.

Oil analysts in Moscow have said that what remains of Yukos is ripe for a takeover by the state. But Rosneft executives and managers dismissed the prospect of a takeover at a presentation on Monday related to the prospective stock offering.

Asked whether his company intended to acquire the remnants of Yukos, a vice president, Sergei I. Kudryashov, said: "These assets are not for sale. For now, we are working on our own assets."

The New York Times

Interfax : Mother, wife leave Krasnokamensk after meeting Khodorkovsky

2006-03-03T19:17:00.000Z

CHITA. March 3 (Interfax) - The wife and mother of Mikhail Khodorkovsky will soon leave Krasnokamensk after visiting the Yukos founder in the town's jail where he is serving his sentence, a source in the Chita region branch of the Federal Service for Correctional Institutions told Interfax.

In her spare time, Khodorkovsky's mother visited a local museum.

Interfax > Politics

UPI : Russian high court sides with businessman

2006-03-03T19:14:00.000Z

MOSCOW, March 3 (UPI) -- Russia's Supreme Court has upheld a complaint by jailed former oil baron Mikhail Khodorkovsky against prison rules that restrict his meetings with lawyers.

The former head of Yukos Oil Co. appealed to the court that regulations concerning prisoners' rights to meet with lawyers were unlawful, the RIA Novosti news agency reported.

Russia's highest court agreed with Khodorkovsky and upheld his complaint Thursday.

The administration of the penal colony in the Siberian region of Chita where Khodorkovsky is serving his eight-year term four times denied him a meeting with lawyers before 6 p.m. Colony regulations state that prisoners can meet with lawyers for no more than four hours and only if they are free from work.

Khodorkovsky complained that this was a violation of his right to qualified legal counsel.

Khodorkovsky and his business partner Platon Lebedev were found guilty of tax evasion and large-scale fraud one year ago, and sentenced to nine years in a low-security prison. A few months later, the Moscow City Court reduced their terms to eight years.

United Press International

Radio Free Europe - Interview: Marina Khodorkovskaya On Her Son, Mikhail

2006-03-02T19:15:00.000Z

On 15 February, RFE/RL Russian Service correspondent Mumin Shakirov spoke with Marina Khodorkovskaya, mother of imprisoned former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovskii. Khodorkovskii was sentenced last September to eight years in prison on charges of fraud and tax evasion and is serving his term in the Russian Far East, at the Krasnokamensk prison colony in Chita Oblast. Khodorkovskaya spoke from the Moscow suburb where she and her husband live in a boarding school for orphans, which her son built 12 years ago.

RFE/RL: How is Mikhail's health?

Khodorkovskaya: A while back he had an operation on his eye and he says that he can't read. [He said] "The lines of text keep moving around and I can't see them." Perhaps his vision has gotten worse; after all, prisons have always been dark. The lawyers say that when they talk to him, what light there is comes from behind him, so it's very difficult for him to read the papers that the lawyers give him. Moreover, there is a screen between him and the lawyers. And they only give him two hours. They say that they can't get much done in two hours and the work isn't very productive because they only let the lawyers in one at a time. So far, he is reading there. But if his vision gets worse, there will be no way to get it checked.

RFE/RL: And is he still sewing?

Khodorkovskaya: As far as I know, he was recently moved to some other kind of work -- that is, he is still in the sewing shop, but he isn't sewing. He was packing something or doing something like that that is more physical.

RFE/RL: What kind of work would he like to be doing?

Khodorkovskaya: The lawyers said the last time they were there, he said: "They call me 'Borisych.' These guys are so young I could adopt them. They're uneducated, miserable." Of course, he wants to teach. He has asked [prison authorities] to buy computers so that the prisoners can study, since they are going to get out of there without any education, without any trade, and they'll just end up in prison again. He wanted to teach them mathematics. By the way, his teachers from school keep calling me and offering to send him teaching materials and the like. And I tell them that they won't give him permission to teach there. He also knows history really well. He always loved history. He has a lot of books on history. He wants to teach them how to organize a small business, how to write a business plan. But instead he is sewing felt shoes -- and his eyesight is bad.

RFE/RL: They say you haven't been able to visit Mikhail in prison and that you've only spoken to him once by telephone. What was that like?

Khodorkovskaya: We all went to the telephone center. They told us that we had to send a telegram so that he could be summoned to speak to us. I was there with my husband, his wife, and his daughter.

RFE/RL: You've said that prison officials have canceled a visit planned for Khodorkovskii's relatives, purportedly because of repair work. Have you at least received letters?

Khodorkovskaya: Not one. He told me over the phone that he has been writing to me. But he is receiving my letters. I give them to his lawyers so that they take them there -- that's faster. Otherwise, it takes a very long time.

RFE/RL Marina Khodorkovskaya thinks President Putin is envious of her son's business success (AFP)You have said that you consider Mikhail a prisoner of conscience and that you believe he is being held at the wishes of President Vladimir Putin. Could you comment on that?

Khodorkovskaya: That envy, that feeling of one's own inadequacy. [Putin] understands this -- that's why he tries to surround himself with his allies. In spite of everything, he doesn't feel that he is in control of the situation. And then there is the money. Grabbing such a delicious morsel [as Khodorkovskii's company, YUKOS] -- that played a big role, I think, in all this. If he didn't want it, then, most likely, his people wouldn't have done it -- or maybe his people are stronger than he is.... Sometimes I think his people are stronger. You know, a German journalist answered this question really well. I asked her why he has such good relations with [former German Chancellor Gerhard] Schroeder. Was Schroeder in the secret services? She said, "No, they simply have the same way of thinking. They had identical lives. Schroeder also came from a poor, insignificant family and really dreamed of occupying high office." That is, [Schroeder] has the same [complex]. Sort of as if a person has no intrinsic worth. It figures that [Putin] would make a career in the secret service. Probably, in our day, that was the only way for an insignificant person to become more or less important.

RFE/RL: What do you think the future holds for your son?

Khodorkovskaya: Civil society is sleeping. The outside world will only get involved if we really want them to. I mean "we" in the broadest sense of the word. As long as there is enough to eat in the stores, everyone will be silent. I have the feeling that most people are only thinking about their stomachs. They'll only rise up if they can't get enough to eat.

RFE/RL: Are you getting any support?

Khodorkovskaya: I get a lot of telephone calls from total strangers of various ages. I get a huge number of letters. When Misha has a birthday, we get whole packets of letters, and telegrams as well.

RFE/RL: Often when a person gets into trouble, some friends disappear and others remain.

Khodorkovskaya: I'd say the cream [remains]. Poor people come to us. My husband and I even laugh about it. They come with groceries! I simply can't convince them that we are already old and don't eat much. And of course, thank God, we have enough to eat. They bring groceries and then I have to look for people to give them away to. At New Year's they came -- even a governor. They brought baskets of New Year's food -- crabs, caviar -- which I won't eat because I'm allergic. So I invite everyone I know over and feed them. Of course, they are afraid, but some people are able to get past their fear and try to do at least something. [Former Prime Minister Mikhail] Kasyanov sent Misha New Year's greetings, and us too. From one embassy, I got a nice bottle of New Year's wine, but it took more than a month to get here from Moscow.

RFE/RL: Why didn't Mikhail, when he saw that it was getting dangerous, leave the country like some of his colleagues did?

Khodorkovskaya: For one thing, he never wanted to live abroad. He had offers even back when everything was going well -- offers to do business there. He never wanted that. He never had any desire for it. I think that he would have felt bad there spiritually. Everyone has their own way of looking at things. After all, even among those of his colleagues who left for Israel, not all of them settled there. A lot of them feel really bad.

RFE/RL: Do you regret that he didn't go abroad?

Khodorkovskaya: I probably do. Probably, of course, it would have been better if he had left. But then again, I don't know how he would have felt there. I mean, spiritually. I can't answer that question.

RFE/RL: Does he regret it?

Khodorkovskaya: I don't think so. I'd like to think that we will see him released. We are young enough that -- God willing -- we can live eight years, or rather, the six remaining years [of Khodorkovskii's sentence]. But if they give him another term, then I'm afraid we won't see him again.

Radio Free Europa/Radio Liberty 2.15.2006

Reuter: Russia's Khodorkovsky Wins More Access To Lawyers - RADIO FREE EUROPE / RADIO LIBERTY

2006-03-02T18:52:00.000Z

March 2, 2006 -- Jailed former Russian oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky won a small legal victory today when a Moscow court ruled he could see his lawyers during working hours at his Siberian prison.

Until now Khodorkovsky, who is serving an eight-year sentence for fraud and tax evasion, could only see his lawyers outside of his prison-mandated work hours. His lawyers argued this was a violation of his rights to proper access to legal advice.

Khodorkovsky, once Russia's richest man, says the charges against him were part of a Kremlin plot to seize control his Yukos oil company.

The Kremlin says it played no role in his conviction.

Reuter via Radio Free Europe

The Moscow Times : A Rare Summit of Discontent in the Altai

2006-03-01T03:31:00.000Z

By Catherine Belton
Staff Writer

BELOKURIKHA, Altai Region -- More than 200 people gathered in the foothills of the Altai Mountains last weekend for a Russian version of the Davos economic forum as state pressure grows on its outsider organizers, opposition politician Vladimir Ryzhkov and a local branch of the Open Russia Foundation set up by Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

As a handful of diehard liberal economists such as Andrei Illarionov, the former economic adviser to President Vladimir Putin, met to discuss economic strategy with Altai businessmen and politicians, officials from the region's administration boycotted the annual gathering for the first time since its inception in 2001. Many usual participants from Moscow made their excuses and did not turn up.

For the core group of liberal policymakers and business people who remained, the forum was a chance to spread the word on the growing might of the new state "corporation" that is taking over swathes of the economy and political life and slowing down economic growth.

For one of the two state officials who did turn up, Mikhail Dmitriyev, the head of the government's Center for Strategic Research, it was a place to present a new study on how the growing lack of political freedom appeared to be putting the brakes on combatting corruption, an issue, he said, the government had had little interest in hearing about these days.

The conference came as the state is increasingly moving into new sectors of the economy, taking over companies in oil, automaking and aviation, essentially reversing a number of the controversial privatizations of the 1990s. At the same time, there has been a growing clampdown on political opposition, most vividly illustrated by the jailing of Khodorkovsky, the former Yukos chief executive. Gubernatorial elections have been abolished, and the State Duma elected in 2007 will have no independent deputies, such as Ryzhkov, who has represented his native Altai region since 1993. At the end of last year, Illarionov resigned his post as presidential adviser saying the Kremlin had gone too far.

The number of no-shows at the Altai meeting, Illarionov said, was a clear example of the Kremlin's "them and ours" policy. The policy -- which he has dubbed "nashism" -- has made many wary of criticizing the authorities for fear of losing business or position and is stifling real debate and blocking opposition.

"It seems to me that the regional authorities were frightened of coming here," Ryzhkov said. "I am in opposition to what the authorities are doing, and Illarionov is too."

Ryzhkov, who as one of the few Duma deputies outside the Kremlin's influence has come under fire himself, said it seemed that United Russia had advised its members not to attend. "They all ignored the invitations," he said. "But this shows a great deal. It shows that the authorities are isolated from new ideas. They don't want to hear criticism or analysis. This is a very worrying sign."

The absentees missed out on discussions with leading regional economists on how to best stoke Altai's flagging economy as well as on the release of Dmitriyev's study on ways to combat corruption, which according to Transparency International leapt to a level higher than in 80 percent of all countries last year and is acting as a major brake on economic growth.

The spike in corruption, Dmitriyev told the conference, coincided with the first fall in the level of Russia's political freedom recorded by Freedom House in 2004. "The best way to combat corruption is through democratic institutions. As soon as they were weakened we got a very sharp result," he said.

Without lowering state corruption, it is not clear if the country's economy is going to grow, he said. "This is a very important question, especially at a time when the government is trying to expand the role of the state," Dmitriyev said in an interview on the sidelines of the conference. "But there is no one in the administration actively fighting corruption. The administration has pushed it back to the bottom of the list."

Still bruised from a time in office in which his railing against the expansion of the state into the economy was swept aside and ignored, Illarionov presented a withering attack on the growing might of the state and said that without political freedom there was no chance for economic growth in Russia.

Using $12,000 for GDP per capita by purchasing power parity as an approximate base line between mid- and high-income countries, he said there were no examples in the world where a country with few political freedoms had managed to become rich.

"The lack of any examples of a rich country lacking political freedoms leads to very serious doubts as to whether any unfree country can cross this line," Illarionov said at the conference Sunday. Russia currently has a GDP per capita of about $9,000.

Nationalizing the oil industry is also not the best way forward to riches, he said, pointing out that since Saudi Arabia took over its energy sector in the mid-1970s, its GDP per capita has dropped from $17,000 to $11,000 now.

Saudi and Venezuelan-style nationalization of resources came under fire too in a presentation Illarionov made on Saturday. He said the state's acquisition of Yukos' main production unit, Yuganskneftegaz, in December 2004 in a forced auction over $28 billion in back taxes was already having a huge impact on economic growth rates overall and on growth rates in the oil sector. While average growth in the oil sector hit a record 12 percent in June 2003, it had fallen to 0.9 percent in August 2005, he said.

As the state moves into other sectors of the economy as well, growth is also being slowed by the government's new "industrial policy" in which German Gref's Economic Development and Trade Ministry is seeking to diversify the economy with its own administrative measures such major tax hikes on the oil sector, Illarionov said.

"Now the main policy of the government is redistribution of monopoly rents and not the creation of a good business climate," he said.

Economic growth at the moment is driven only by high oil prices, he said. If prices had stayed at 1999 levels, GDP would have fallen 10 percent this year, he said.

The most worrying sign for the economy, however, he said, was the sharp drop in political freedom. Last year, Freedom House for the first time rated Russia as an "unfree country" in its rating of 25 transition economies, moving Russia from ninth place to 22nd.

"Any country that does not have free competition of ideas is doomed," he said. "Other countries that followed such policies over decades ended up with withered economies."

Ryzhkov said the unwillingness of the Altai administration to take part in this year's conference was a telling sign of the government's increasingly closed-mindedness. "This shows that the ruling elite does not want free discussion," he said in closing remarks Sunday. "There has been a change of leadership, and the new governor has been appointed from Moscow. Why discuss anything when it is the boss in Moscow who is deciding all policy?"

Calls to restore political freedom and combat corruption were likely to fall on deaf ears, Ryzhkov said.

Dmitriyev said his center had conducted its study on corruption on its own initiative. "The last time we were asked for an analysis on anti-corruption measures was 1 1/2 years ago when the program of administrative reforms was being prepared," he said in the interview.

This time, he said, the center had conducted the analysis as part of a major new study aimed at understanding the global problems Russia will face over the next 10 years.

The corruption analysis compared Russia with other transition economies such as Poland and China. It found that all transition economies experienced a major boom in corruption in the early 1990s when the market was first freed, but it was later reined in by the checks and balances instilled by the strengthening of democratic institutions such as a free press and an independent judiciary.

While in Poland corruption dropped to levels below other developed European economies, in Russia it dropped and then rose again sharply last year, he said.

Chinese officials brought down corruption through stiff administrative measures. Last year, however, corruption in China stayed at the same level as before. "This could be because you can't have an effective anti-corruption strategy without democratic institutions," Dmitriyev said. "Administrative measures alone have not allowed China to reduce corruption to levels in Central and East European countries."

The sharp rise in Russia last year, he said, looked to be the result of the reduction in democratic freedoms, while administrative measures -- such as the administrative reform he helped draft -- had had little impact.

"Now that it's at the stage of implementation, it does not look like a reform but like something that will maintain the status quo," he told the conference.

Times have changed greatly from when he first came to Altai in early 2000. Soon after his trip, he was offered a position helping the future economic development and trade minister, Gref, draft a strategic plan for liberal reform ahead of Putin's election in March 2000. Since then, after a promising Putin first term, most of this plan appears to have been shelved or watered down.

The other state official attending, Andrei Klepach, a director of a department in Gref's ministry, argued against Illarionov's criticism of growing tendencies toward nationalization. He said the only acquisitions by the state had been the purchase of Yugansk and state-controlled Gazprom's buy of Sibneft last September. "This does not mean the state has abandoned the market model," Klepach said. "It was a political decision."

He said the state's recent takeover of management at carmaker AvtoVAZ did not involve any handover of ownership. "The state has been brought in as a crisis manager," he said. "There is no other way to guard the plant against bankruptcy."

Illarionov fired back by saying that the state was now taking over control of financial flows without bothering to gain ownership rights first. "The state is now using the same methods as Boris Abramovich [Berezovsky]," he said.

Putin's decree last week on creating a new state aviation holding company majority-owned by the government effectively diluted private ownership of aviation firms where state ownership was less than 50 percent. "The state is again showing that it has no respect for property rights," the president's former adviser said.

The state's $24 billion spending spree on Yugansk and Sibneft, meanwhile, had come directly out of the pockets of the people, Illarionov said. "As a result, Russian society is going to be poorer. All they are being compensated with is $5 billion in national projects," he said.

Even though Ryzhkov vowed to continue holding the forum in Altai -- which he first conceived as Russia's answer to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he has been a participant -- it is not clear what the future is for independent conferences like this, especially those organized by funds affiliated with Khodorkovsky's Open Russia.

Open Russia has opened so-called "public policy schools" in 52 regions, and the Altai Krai Fund for Social Support and Civil Initiatives that helped organize the Belokurikha meeting is one of them. Other opposition politicians such as Mikhail Kasyanov and Garry Kasparov have spoken at other regional seminars held by the public policy schools. Even though Open Russia has spun off the public policy schools as independent entities, they have still come under pressure from the tax authorities.

Khodorkovsky is due to step down as Open Russia's chairman in April, said Ryzhkov, who is a member of the organization's management board.

The Belokurikha conference was also co-organized by a German think tank, the Friedrich Naumann Foundation. Ryzhkov said suspicion of foreign NGOs, especially following the recent scandal involving alleged British spies, also could have spooked regional officials and influenced their decision to stay away.

Interfax : Court cancels reprimand imposed on Khodorkovsky

2006-02-09T01:55:00.000Z

CHITA. Feb 9 (Interfax) - The Krasnokamensk City Court in the Chita region on Thursday canceled a reprimand imposed on ex-Yukos chief Mikhail Khodorkovsky by the administration of the penal colony where he is serving his term.

Krasnokamensk City Court Chairman Larisa Zhukova told Interfax that the court agreed with Khodorkovsky's lawyer, Natalya Terekhova, that he was punished groundlessly.

Khodorkovsky was officially reprimanded by the colony administration for abandoning his workplace without permission. However, the lawyer proved in court that her client in fact did not leave the working area.

Bush's Big Silence

2006-01-23T12:35:00.000Z

Will the President Object to Russia's Regression?

By Fred Hiatt

If promoting democracy is President Bush's largest ambition, then Russia is his largest failure.

Not that President Vladimir Putin is the world's most repressive ruler -- far from it. Dictatorships in Burma, North Korea and Zimbabwe are more stifling. So, for that matter, are tyrannies in Russia's neighborhood, such as Belarus, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.

But no other nation has regressed from openness to authoritarianism during Bush's time in office as dramatically and decisively as Russia -- and with less apparent objection from Bush.

Of course, no U.S. president is responsible for Russia's fate; Russians are. Yet Syrians and Egyptians will determine their own fates, too, and that doesn't stop Bush from wielding U.S. diplomacy and rhetoric to aid pro-democracy forces in their countries. His foreign policy is grounded in the belief that over time the United States can be a force for liberty throughout the world.

So his insouciance with respect to Russia is a mystery. Does it mask a calculation that what happens inside Russia just isn't as important as democratic development in the Middle East, given the U.S. war against radical Islamic terrorists? That it makes sense to keep Putin as a partner while fighting those more pertinent battles?

That would be a miscalculation, for at least three reasons. First, Russia is one front in the war. Its brutal tactics in the southern province of Chechnya are radicalizing Muslim residents there; growing Slavic nationalism risks alienating Muslim minorities in other parts of Russia; and Putin's succor of dictators in neighboring Islamic countries such as Uzbekistan helps create the kind of terror-incubators that Bush said after Sept. 11 could no longer be tolerated.

Second, while an authoritarian Russia may offer tactical cooperation from time to time according to its interests, it cannot be a strategic partner of the America that Bush described in his second inaugural address, because the two countries' values and goals will differ so sharply.

Third, and perhaps most damaging to Bush's strategy, is the negative example Russia provides. In the 1990s, democratization seemed inexorable. Countries were moving toward freedom at different speeds, and some hadn't moved at all -- but with the fall of communism, all eventually would. The ease and speed with which Putin has reversed course saps the sense of momentum and inevitability that could be Bush's biggest ally.

Irina Yasina, director of a pro-democracy foundation in Moscow, said the mood in Russia today resembles what Russians recall as the "stagnation era" under General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev. Yasina, 42, remembers as a 10-year-old being told by her father -- the now well-known liberal economist Yevgeny Yasin -- that he felt buried alive by the communist system.

"But at least then we knew that we were at the end of something," Yasina, a former journalist, said during a visit to Washington last week. "What is most frightening now is that we don't know whether something is ending or is only just beginning."

This month Putin signed legislation that could shutter Yasina's foundation and many other civic organizations. The law creates a Soviet-style bureaucracy to register nongovernmental organizations, leaving the qualifications so vague that the bureaucrats, or the Kremlin, will be free to license or reject as they choose.

Yasina's foundation is a likely target because it was founded, and is still largely endowed, by billionaire oilman Mikhail Khodorkovsky, whom Putin has had confined to a labor camp near the Chinese border because the tycoon dared hint of a political challenge. The camp is a nine-hour plane ride followed by a 15-hour train ride from Moscow, but sometimes when his lawyers arrive they are told they cannot see their client because lawyer visiting hours coincide with forced-labor hours, Yasina said. Khodorkovsky's visit with his wife, promised for month's end, was canceled -- because, he was told, the visiting room is undergoing renovation.

This may seem petty, but pettiness and paranoia are hallmarks of a president who increasingly has isolated himself from anyone but former KGB agents like himself. The broadcast media are Kremlin-controlled, as are parliament, provincial governors, unjailed business tycoons and the judiciary. All of these sectors were free and independent when Putin -- and Bush -- took office.

Now, although they are weak and he is strong, Putin is going after civic organizations, because they are the final outposts of independent activity -- and because he is convinced that the CIA will use such groups to threaten his regime.

This is the man whom Bush will visit in July when Putin hosts a Group of Eight meeting in St. Petersburg. There will be fine photo opportunities in repainted czarist palaces, and the message Putin wants to send his subjects will be clear: I am a czar, and the leaders of the world's democracies do not care; they accept me. The question for Bush is whether he is happy to help Putin send that message.

The Washington Post, 1.23.2006

For Russia, dependence on 'a man-made disaster' - Print Version - International Herald Tribune

2006-01-13T11:48:00.000Z

By Catherine Belton
THURSDAY, JANUARY 12, 2006

OKTYABRSKOYE, Russia Stacked in Yury Filipchenko's bookcases are maps charting the vast deposits of uranium ore he discovered here 40 years ago that fueled the Soviet Union's transformation into a nuclear superpower.

The geologist's crammed bookcases also hold another legacy: thick reports that plot radioactive pollution zones, heavy-metal deposits and acid rain.

Filipchenko's village, Oktyabrskoye, is today a ramshackle collection of wooden huts and potholed roads surrounded by mine shafts and dilapidated uranium-processing facilities barely two kilometers, or 1.2 miles, away.

Once it was a prestigious place. Built in 1964 as the first outpost in the Soviet government's drive for uranium on Russian soil, the village spawned a town, Krasnokamensk, about 20 kilometers away and a uranium mine that became, for a time, the biggest in the world.

Now the village, located in eastern Siberia just 60 kilometers from the border with China, lies neglected and poisoned by uranium dust and radioactive gases. "This is a man-made disaster area," Filipchenko said, unfurling a map showing radiation and pollution levels from a nearby power station and uranium enrichment plant.

Uncovered mountains of discarded uranium ore dot the horizon, while just over the hill, a vast open crater marks the site of Russia's first uranium mine.

It is not just an environmental disaster. Lack of investment also bodes ill for Russia's nuclear industry, experts say. The Krasnokamensk mine is the sole uranium producer of any significance on Russian land, producing enough ore to supply half the needs of its plants. Without investment, the supply of ore from the mine will end.

"Krasnokamensk is of huge strategic importance," said Vladimir Chuprov, who heads the energy division at the Moscow office of Greenpeace and has closely investigated Russia's nuclear industry. "If it goes, then Russia loses 50 percent of its supply."

The condition of Krasnokamensk is typical of Russia's transformation to capitalism. It is no small irony that Mikhail Khodor-kovsky, one of the most vilified of Russia's oligarchs, is serving his eight-year sentence in the Krasnokamensk prison camp.

But it is not private business barons who have let the place go to seed. The Krasnokamensk mine and the plant that processes the ore into concentrated uranium ore, or yellowcake, are owned by a state nuclear agency, TVEL.

"We could take measures to improve safety, but we just don't have the money," said an official from the Priargunsky combine, which runs the mine, the processing plant and other facilities. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized by TVEL to speak to the press.

Without investment to build a new mine, the combine at Krasnokamensk will run out of ore in 2012, the combine official said. Currently it produces 3,000 tons of uranium a year, almost half the amount needed to supply Russia's nuclear power stations, said the combine official and Maxim Shingaryov, who heads the information center for the Federal Atomic Energy Agency, or Rosatom.

TVEL, with headquarters in Moscow, is run by Alexander Nyago, a former telecommunications executive from St. Petersburg who is reported to be close to President Vladimir Putin. It also owns other processing plants and sells fuel rods for nuclear power stations in Russia and abroad. In 2004, as world uranium prices climbed, the agency had an official profit of $164 million. With world yellowcake prices doubling over the past year to $33 per pound, profit is expected to be even larger in 2005.

Officials at the Krasnokamensk combine, however, say most of their cash goes toward paying taxes and wages for the company's 12,500 workers. Officially, the average monthly wage is 10,000 rubles, or about $350, low for an industry where the health risks are high.

Over all, Russia needs about 15,000 tons of uranium a year to run its power stations, fuel its nuclear submarines and meet its export agreements, according to researchers at the Natural Resource Ministry. What is not provided by the combine at Krasnokamensk partly comes from recycling fuel and uranium ore imports.

Mainly, however, the shortfall is made up from uranium stockpiled during Soviet times. But these supplies are being sold so quickly that they could run out as early as 2010, according to a report by Natural Resources Ministry researchers that was presented in 2004 to an international conference on the nuclear industry, held in Tomsk.

"Russia will be hit with a uranium crisis a lot earlier than 2020," said the report, a copy of which was obtained by The Moscow Times. "In the next seven to eight years it will turn from an exporter of natural uranium into an importer of it."

If the report is accurate, it could have serious consequences for world uranium markets. World uranium prices have been climbing partly because of a lack of information about Russia's stockpiles and partly because consumption worldwide is almost twice the quantity that is produced.

For much of the past decade, uranium prices had been so low that it made no commercial sense to invest in the mining industry, said Shingaryov of Rosatom. As recently as 2000, world uranium prices were as low as $7 per pound.

In written answers to e-mailed questions, Stanislav Golovinsky, a TVEL vice president, sidestepped the question of whether TVEL would raise the price it pays for yellowcake in line with world prices to allow wage increases at the plant. He said that TVEL did have a plan for constructing a new mine but gave no sense of urgency, estimating that the mines at Krasnokamensk have enough ore to last for 15 to 20 years.

Back in Soviet times, governments threw rubles at the nuclear industry.

Now, the state is besieged with problems that compete with the nuclear industry for cash. "The list is endless," said Gennady Pshakin, an expert on the nuclear industry. "Pensions, the military, the aircraft industry, the missile industry - they're all suffering."

Whether or not funds are disbursed to keep Krasnokamensk's industry going, it has been left with a dangerous legacy that urgently needs attention, environmentalists and residents say.

The last time a major environmental study was conducted was in the early 1990s. Filipchenko and other scientists, including a group of doctors from the state university in Irkutsk, spent months mapping levels of pollution from the mine, the plant and the nearby power station, which is fired with uranium-contaminated coal.

After some of the results were smuggled to scientists in Sweden and shared with Greenpeace activists, who used the data as part of a widely publicized report in 1994 on the dangerous state of Krasnokamensk, scientific investigation was stopped.

"No one has denied this data, but no one risks repeating the experiment," Filipchenko said.

What Filipchenko and his colleagues found were dangerously high levels of radon gas emanating from the cellars of scores of houses in Oktyabrskoye, mounting levels of uranium dust and residues of heavy metals like mercury. "The entire village is in a zone of acid pollution," Filipchenko said.

After the environmental studies reached the Greenpeace activists, federal officials in Moscow began spending money in the mid-1990s to resettle the residents. But since the 1998 financial crisis, there has not been enough money. Two hundred and forty families were resettled in Krasnokamensk; 680 families remain.

Back in 1964, Oktyabrskoye was built as temporary housing for the first group of geologists who arrived here and discovered the deposits, which is why it was located so close to the mines. When more deposits were found under the village, the government decided to go ahead and mine anyway.

As a result, radon gas seeps through cracks in the soil and into houses. In some houses, where owners dug underground cellars for storing produce, the levels measured were more than 10 times the norm, the 1994 study found; this was backed up by checks in 2001. Exposure to high doses of radon can cause lung cancer.

Those who remain in the village have become so inured to their surroundings that they gather scraps of uranium ore from the heaps beside the mines to fill potholes in the village roads. "They just take it and sprinkle it outside their own homes," Filipchenko said.

Gathered outside one of the run-down village shops, a group of residents said they had regularly tried to push their case for resettlement. "We live in the middle of an industrial zone," said Yekaterina Zimniyeva, a former mine worker who helped build the mines in the late 1960s. "No one should be living here."

Zimniyeva had her young grandson, who, she said, constantly suffers from chest colds. "Here, we eat uranium, we drink uranium, we breathe uranium," she said. "Everyone's legs here hurt terribly. People suffer heart problems, and there isn't anything to breathe."

Town doctors insist health problems, in the village and the town, are no worse than average.

"Radiation levels are no higher than they are across the entire Siberian Federal District," said Viktor Turanov, a surgeon in the oncological wing of Regional Hospital No. 4. "And the level of cancer is no higher than the average across all of Russia." He blamed the villagers' woes on poverty and unhealthy lifestyles. "Their legs would hurt less if they stopped smoking and started drinking less," he said.

But even those who live in the town believe their surroundings are unhealthy. One afternoon in a Krasnokamensk grocery store, two women whispered about coming medical checks for breast cancer with tears in their eyes. "Here, the graveyard is bigger than the town," one of them told this reporter.

But town officials insist that the health risks of living and working here are minimal. "The population of the town is stable," said Krasnokamensk's mayor, German Kolov.

There is little way of determining who is right because there are no conclusive studies available. Kolov recently ordered his health officials to produce a report detailing the causes of death in the Krasnokamensk region, but it is unclear when it would be ready and whether it would be public.

The mayor said he hoped the attention that the town has received since Khodorkovsky arrived at the nearby prison camp would help win more government funding for the resettlement of the Oktyabrskoye villagers.

Greenpeace's Chuprov, however, said he feared that the politically charged presence of the former oil tycoon could make it even harder to carry out environmental studies.

"We need to know how much dust is in the area," he said, calling for an independent investigation. "But it's not clear if the authorities are ready to allow this, especially now. If anyone dares to do this, it is likely they'll find themselves in the cell next door to Khodorkovsky."

International Herald Tribune, 1.12.2005

No Booze But Lots of Tea for New Year's

2006-01-04T21:50:00.000Z

By Carl Schreck
Staff Writer

Russian tradition has it that how you celebrate New Year's will dictate the course of the next 12 months. This New Year's Eve, hundreds of thousands of people will hope for a better 2006 as they welcome the New Year behind bars.

What the country's most famous inmate, Yukos founder Mikhail Khodorkovsky, has planned for Saturday night is something of a mystery. But National Bolshevik Party leader Eduard Limonov, who was once the best-known prisoner, says any festivities are dependent on the goodwill of the warden.

Federal Prison Service head Yury Kalinin announced earlier in December that the number of people in the country's prisons and detention centers jumped by more than 45,000 this year, meaning that more than 800,000 will be incarcerated for New Year's and Orthodox Christmas on Jan. 7.

A late-arriving prisoner might be former Nuclear Power Minister Yevgeny Adamov, whom Swiss authorities agreed to extradite to Russia according to a court ruling made public Thursday.

Thanks to local charity organizations across the country and a little rule-bending by prison authorities, the holidays have become more bearable, said Valery Abramkin, head of the Moscow Center for Prison Reform, a think tank.

"Luckily, compared with 10 years ago, local communities have started to think more about prisoners," said Abramkin, a former dissident who

spent six years in Soviet-era jails. "They send care packages and letters. In general, you could say citizens have become more sympathetic to the plight of prisoners."

Since 1993, Abramkin's organization has been conducting a holiday program whereby it delivers presents and supplies to juvenile and women's prisons in western Russia. This year, the organization is visiting about 10 prisons, delivering envelopes, notebooks and postcards, as well as fruit and chocolates, Abramkin said.

"The visits will run into February," he said. "We can't make it to all of the prisons by Christmas."

Officially, no alcohol is permitted, even as part of New Year's festivities, while lights out is at 10 p.m. on Dec. 31 and reveille is as usual at 6 a.m. on New Year's Day, a Federal Prison Service spokeswoman said. "If they want to watch New Year's Eve television shows, including the presidential address, they can watch a video recording the next day," said the spokeswoman, who declined to give her name.

It was unclear whether Khodorkovsky and his fellow inmates would have a chance to celebrate.

Khodorkovsky's lawyer Anton Drel, who returned to Moscow after visiting his client in the Krasnokamensk prison, near the Chinese border, on Wednesday, said the two had not had enough time to discuss New Year's preparations.

Maxim Dbar, a spokesman for Khodorkovsky's press center, said it was up to the prison administration to decide whether to allow inmates to stay up until midnight.

Prison officials could not be reached for comment Thursday.

While alcohol is taboo, Limonov said the administration of the Saratov region detention facility, where he was held during his trial on charges of illegal arms possession and terrorism, turned a blind eye to the 10 p.m. bed call on Dec. 31, 2002.

"I returned from court and ate smoked chicken and drank chifir with my comrades," Limonov said, referring to a strong brew of tea that gives an extreme caffeine buzz. "Then everyone was allowed to watch television until 6 a.m. -- the only night they didn't make us go to bed at 10 p.m."

Limonov said that during his detention in Moscow's Lefortovo prison in 2001, the prison warden wished the inmates a happy New Year shortly after midnight, while prison guards could be heard drinking and playing cards in the hallway.

"There was no alcohol for us. We were in a red prison," Limonov said, referring to a prison that is controlled by the camp administration, as opposed to so-called black prisons, which are regulated and enforced by jailed crime bosses.

Despite prison dry laws, procuring booze for New Year's toasts should not be a problem for many prisoners, said Naum Nim, editor of the magazine Nevolye, which deals with prison life.

"These days, you can get anything you want in prison, especially if you have money," said Nim, a Soviet-era dissident who twice spent New Year's behind bars -- in 1985 and 1986 -- before his release in 1987.

Nim's assessment echoed the words of Deputy Prosecutor General Sergei Fridinsky, who vented his frustrations at a Dec. 16 news conference. He said that for a price, many prison staff provided inmates with alcohol, cigarettes and cell phones.

Guards at one detention center allowed a suspect to meet with a woman and then drank vodka with him, Fridinsky said, Rossiiskaya Gazeta reported.

According to Nim, celebrating New Year's in prison with alcohol was unthinkable during Soviet times. Tea was the object of desire.

"Usually, it was almost impossible to get any tea," Nim said. "But for New Year's, we would get tea, cake and cigarettes. But it wasn't a typical cake.

"There are more goods now and prisoners have access to tea and baked goods. But we would make our own pastry out of sukhariki with sweetened condensed milk," he said, referring to the dried bread snack.

The prison service spokeswoman confirmed that the administration in each prison would decide what kinds of New Year's festivities, if any, they would allow. "In many prisons, the inmates themselves organize concerts and perform skits, anything to raise their spirits," she said.

Prisoners may have a special menu for New Year's Eve, including pastries and salads, and some prisons are spruced up with holiday decorations, including New Year's trees, she said.

Prison officials often cut inmates some slack on New Year's so they can enjoy their own celebrations, Nim said.

"They want to get to the table themselves to eat and drink," Nim said.

Overzealous partying by prison guards could provide the more restless inmates with a window of opportunity, according to an essay by St. Petersburg journalist Yury Gavryuchenkov posted on the Zhurnal Samizdat web site.

Describing his New Year's Eve on Dec. 31, 1997, in a St. Petersburg detention facility, Gavryuchenkov wrote that the guards fell asleep at about 3 a.m. "If we had been able to open the cell door, we could have gone directly to Finlandsky Station to pick up some beer. But we couldn't get to the lock, so we just kept watching television."

In the most daring New Year's jailbreak in recent memory, Yevgeny Pechyonkin crawled to freedom through an 85-meter tunnel he had constructed at the UF-91/3 prison colony in Novosibirsk on Dec. 31, 2000.

Prison guards noticed he was missing only on New Year's Day. Police eventually caught up with Pechyonkin, a convicted conman and an engineer by trade, two years later.

Other holiday season escapes have been less successful. Eighteen teenagers wanting to go home for the holidays fled a prison colony near St. Petersburg on Dec. 23, 2002. Most of them were captured within a few hours, and the rest were rounded up a week later.

Staff Writer Anatoly Medetsky contributed to this report.

The Moscow Times, 12.30.2005

Putin, Khodorkovsky and the trial that rocked Russia

2006-01-04T21:47:00.000Z

The trial of Russia’s richest businessman, Mikhail Khordokovsky this year sent renewed fear through Russian society with claims that the case was politically motivated.

On a rainy day in May, hundreds of demonstrators chanted “freedom, freedom” outside Moscow’s Meshchanski court. Inside, oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky was on trial accused of fraud and tax evasion. Eventually a verdict was reached, but the judge took several days to read out the sentence, adding to the length of the trial which had already dragged on for months.

Lawyer Robert Amsterdam thought the slow delivery of the final outcome was a deliberate ploy. "They want to make journalists lose interest”, he said at the time:
"As long as the media is here, they’ll try to draw out the sentence. The process is political. When the Kremlin decides the time is ripe, judgment will be passed.''

Political ambitions
Khodorkovsky was arrested in October 2003. At 40 years old he’d already accomplished a lot. He was the wealthiest person in Russia, the owner of the modern and successful Yukos oil company, and still very ambitious. He dreamt of merging Yukos and the oil firm Sibneft to make one of the world’s energy giants. Khodorkovsky was also interested in politics. He supported various opposition parties and wasn’t shy about his own political ambitions.

When the public prosecutor opened a case against Khordokovsky, the businessman understood that it was a serious matter. "I’m available”, Khodorkovsky said at a press conference just a few days before his arrest. "I’m not planning on becoming a political emigrant. I’m leaving on a business trip, but I’ll be back on Saturday. If the prosecutor has taken a decision by then, I’ll be at his disposal.''

Despite his obvious willingness to cooperate, Khodorkovsky was dramatically arrested and imprisoned by armed, masked men. At about the same time, the tax office bombarded Yukos with a series of demands running into billions of dollars. The successful company was forced to sell its main subsidiary, which ended up as part of the state-owned Rosneft oil firm. That meant that part of Yukos had effectively been renationalised.

Clashes
Despite the long-running trial, there was no let-up in the demonstrations outside court with Khordokovsky’s supporters often clashing with police. Finally on 31 May, the sentence was complete, nine years in a Siberian prison camp for Khordorkovsky and his business partner, Platon Lebedev.

While protests about the convictions carried on, there were also those who supported the legal action. Researcher Andrei Kortunov thinks many poorer Russians agree with the sentence. "They only think it’s a pity that Khodorkovsky is the only wealthy businessman to have been locked up,'' he says, "they’d like to see all the other rich people behind bars and stripped of their wealth. Many people hold this view, especially among the poorer population groups who lost more than they gained during the reform years.''

Unpredictable
For Russia’s growing middle class, however, Khodorkovsky’s case is proof that President Vladimir Putin can change the rules as he wishes. "Many young people are now thinking of pursuing a career abroad. Khodorkovsky is an important figure for them, the representative of a new generation, a modern manager, someone they want to be like,'' says Kortunov.

And Kortunov’s colleague, Mark Urnov, a former adviser of Boris Yeltsin, sees the Khodorkovsky case as a turning point. He thinks Putin made a mistake which has resulted in economic stagnation and a return of fear in society. "I’m convinced Russia would have been a model of economic development if the Yukos scandal hadn’t taken place and Putin had stuck to the political course he set before 2003,'' says Urnov:
"History would have judged Putin as a truly great president, but the Yukos affair has ruined that possibility for good.''

Radio Nederland, 12.30.2005

Ex-Prisoners Write Yukos Founder on New Year's

2006-01-04T21:44:00.000Z

Former "prisoners of conscience" and rights activists including Andrei Sakharov's widow sent jailed businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky New Year's wishes and likened his fate to that of Soviet-era dissidents.

Khodorkovsky, once Russia's richest man as owner of oil company Yukos, is serving a prison term in Krasnokamensk on fraud and tax charges that human rights campaigners say are politically driven.

"Anyone, who even glanced at the documents in your case understands that the conviction of Khodorkovsky was illegal, unfounded and political," said a letter signed by 22 people and distributed by Khodorkovsky's spokesman.

Russian officials say he was merely a dishonest businessman who got caught.

"When a prison fence is in front of you for years in the forseeable future, even the traditional 'Happy New Year' starts to have a double meaning. We understand and remember this," the letter said.

"But you must celebrate it. Because the old year ought to be sent off properly. ... Only God knows what your New Year will be like, but we hope it will be no worse than 2005."

Among the signatories was Yelena Bonner, widow and fellow campaigner of Sakharov, the Soviet nuclear physicist turned rights champion who spent years in exile for his activities.

Other one-time dissidents jailed in the communist period who signed the letter included Sergei Kovalyov, a co-head of rights group Memorial; Gleb Yakunin; and Pavel Litvinov.

The signatories also included Alexander Nikitin and Grigory Pasko, both of whom spent time in jail in Russia's post-communist era on spying charges brought after they exposed environmental disasters.

"In Krasnokamensk, you will mark the New Year six hours ahead of Moscow. It's not bad to live six hours ahead of the Kremlin and the general prosecutor. It means you will be free six hours earlier," the letter said.

The Moscow Times, 12.30.2005

Mikhail Khodorkovsky Might Go To Court Again�

2006-01-04T21:40:00.000Z

Honor and Dignity

Yesterday, in Khamovniki Court of Moscow there was a first day of hearings of the case Federal Penitentiary Service (FPS) versus TV Channel Ren TV, TV anchor Marianna Maximovskaya, and attorneys of former head of YUKOS Mikhail Khodorkovsky and former head of MENATEP Platon Lebedev. Because defense did not show up at court the court session had to be postponed.
As Kommersant reported earlier (Dec.16, 2005) FPS did not like the program “Week with Marianna Maximovskaya,” which aired on Aug. 27, 2005. The program was about putting Platon Lebedev in solitary confinement and Mikhail Khodorkovsky announced a hunger strike because of that. The FTS considered the phrase of Maximovskaya about Khodorkovsky’s hunger strike as not true. The federal agency also saw statements of attorneys Evgeny Baru and Yuri Schmidt, who described the bad prison conditions of their clients, as “a slander against Matrosskaya Tishina penitentiary employees.” The FTS filed a law suit about defending its honor, dignity and business reputation and demanded from defendants a public retraction of their statements.

Maximovskaya and Ren TV channel lawyer Alexander Polozok came to court yesterday. However, instead of attorneys Baru and Schmidt, their colleague Vladimir Krasnov showed up. He presented documents to the judge that Evgeny Baru is visiting his client Platon Lebedev in prison facility located in village Harp. He also reported that Yuri Schmidt is currently sick. The court considered the reasons for not showing as satisfactory and postponed the hearing.

Maximovskaya also suggested inviting Mikhail Khodorkovsky to court as a witness for the defense: “FTS in its appeal says that my statement about Khodorkovsky’s hunger strike is false. Then, let him say personally in front of the court if he had a hunger strike or not.”

The hearings will be open again on January 19.

Kommersant will be monitoring the process.

Kommersant, 12.20.2005

Prison Service Sues Ren-TV Anchor

2005-12-19T23:54:00.000Z

By Oksana Yablokova
Staff Writer

The Moscow branch of the Federal Prisons Service is suing Ren-TV anchor Marianna Maksimovskaya and the lawyers of major Yukos shareholders Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev over a report that Khodorkovsky went on a hunger strike while jailed at Matrosskaya Tishina.

Maksimovskaya, Khodorkovsky's lawyer Yury Schmidt and Lebedev's lawyer Yevgeny Baru have been summoned to Moscow's Khamovnichesky District Court for a hearing in the libel case on Monday.

"According to this lawsuit, I am being asked to deny the fact that Khodorkovsky went on a hunger strike -- a fact that was reported by all the newspapers," Maksimovskaya said by telephone Friday.

It was unclear when the lawsuit was filed and why prison officials had waited roughly four months to sue.

"Prison conditions are a hotly debated issue. There are a lot of reports and speculation about them, and not all of them true," said prisons service spokesman Sergei Tsigankov.

He refused further comment, citing the pending outcome of the lawsuit.

Baru called the lawsuit the latest in a series of attempts to discredit Yukos lawyers and Ren-TV, the only channel that "offered an objective report of the incident."

"Honestly, I do not believe that the prisons service is very worried about its reputation," Baru said by telephone.

Baru said he and the other two defendants received the court summons on Thursday.

Khodorkovsky went on a hunger strike on Aug. 19 to protest the transfer of Lebedev to solitary confinement, the two men's lawyers told reporters at the time. Khodorkovsky said that his anti-Kremlin rhetoric while in Matrosskaya Tishina had angered the authorities and that Lebedev was being punished.

Prison officials, however, said the transfer was punishment for Lebedev's refusal to take a daily walk, and denied that Khodorkovsky was on a hunger strike.

The lawyers said Khodorkovsky ended the hunger strike after seven days, when he learned Lebedev had been returned to a regular cell.

Baru said he could not attend Monday's hearing because he would be traveling to the prison near the Arctic Circle where Lebedev is serving an eight-year sentence for fraud and tax evasion. Khodorkovsky is serving eight years on similar charges at a prison near the Chinese border.

Baru said he had arranged the visit with his client weeks before the lawsuit was filed and could not reschedule it.

He stressed, however, that he would fight the suit.

Schmidt could not be reached for comment.

Maksimovskaya -- who worked as an anchor at NTV television before it was effectively taken over by the state in 2001 -- said she was curious to hear what prison officials would say in court. "There were no falsehoods in my words or the words of the lawyers," she said.

The lawsuit against Maksimovskaya was filed less than a month after Ren-TV abruptly canceled a news show hosted by Olga Romanova. The show was pulled off the air hours after Romanova publicly accused Ren-TV management of blocking reports that might irritate Kremlin officials.

The Moscow Times, 12.19.2005

Evans faces resistance over Rosneft post

2005-12-19T23:51:00.000Z

By Caroline Daniel in Washington

The prospect that Donald Evans, the former US Commerce Secretary, would accept the post of chairman of Rosneft, the Russian state-owned oil company, is being received poorly in Washington amid fears it could spark allegations of cronyism.

White House officials had declined to comment on reports that Mr Evans, a close friend of President George W.Bush, had been offered the job by President Vladimir Putin.

However the Financial Times revealed on Friday that he was “seriously considering” the position and Mr Putin, without naming anybody, confirmed he was “interested in inviting high-class foreign managers,” saying it reflected an “element of openness in Russia’s economy.”

Although Congressional reaction has been muted, several analysts and friends of Mr Evans cautioned that it would face resistance, especially with rising concern about the political direction of Russia, seen in moves to regulate non-governmental organizations.

One friend and former colleague of Mr Evans predicted he would decline the offer - perhaps as early as mid week. He noted that Mr Evans had left Washington for family reasons and would be unlikely to want to travel to Russia. “He would want to show respect for the offer and that he has given this deliberate thought.”

“Eyebrows would go up all over town,” said a former NSC official involved with energy issues. “The fact that he would be cashing in his political connections is not the problem, but doing it in a foreign county and a country like Russia. People would question whether is he just a figurehead and being used. Why take the political risk?”

Mr Evans’s appointment could confer legitimacy on Rosneft, which is controversial because of its role in the break-up of Yukos, the oil company formerly controlled by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former oligarch who is serving a prison sentence in Siberia. Rosneft took over the main production arm of Yukos, in a forced auction last December.

As Commerce Secretary, Mr Evans helped strengthen the US-Russian commercial energy relationship, creating the first joint energy summit in 2002. Since leaving office he has spearheaded critical fundraising for Mr Bush, such as for his presidential library and Gulf Coast reconstruction.

Another friend of Mr Evans who has discussed the offer with him said the approach had come as a surprise. “His political ties to the White House and his oil background in Texas brings immediate gravitas. Don is someone the Russians respect - he told them the likelihood of oil hitting $50.”

He warned that he would advise Mr Evans not to take the job: “The reality is the Russians want something that he should not feel comfortable delivering. You have got to worry about the motive, and whether he would have any real control. It is hard to believe the Russians would give that up. Democrats would say it is another example of cronyism.”

The Financial Times, 12.18.2005

Sign our petition !

2005-12-19T22:46:00.000Z

Russian NGO "SOVEST" has launched an international petition. The appeal calls for changing the places of imprisonment for Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev from the penal colonies where they are currently serving out their sentences.
To sign the petition, please send a mail to signature@sovest.org with your name, surname, town of residence and profession.

To: Yuri Ivanovich Kalinin
FPS Director
Federal Penitentiary Service

Dear Mr Kalinin :

In its ruling of September 22, 2005, the Moscow City Court upheld the judgment of the conviction of Mikhail Borisovich Khodorkovsky, former head of the YUKOS [oil company], and Platon Leonidovich Lebedev, former head of [international financial institution] MENATEP, whereby they were condemned to 8 years of imprisonment in a general regime penal colony. We believe the judgment of conviction to be unlawful and unwarranted and we shall use whatever legal means are available to us to have this reviewed in a fair and unbiased process.

But it is equally important to us to ensure that the rights of of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev are observed during their detention in these penitentiaries. We believe that that is the task of all of us. Every citizen, including high-ranking officials, should be motivated to see that the penal system as a structure of the state is an element worthy of our Constitution, with principles of law and humanity above all, rather than a place in which tyranny rules and human rights are flouted.

In light of the above, we question the validity of the choice of location for Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev to serve out their sentences.

As you know, Platon Lebedev was taken [moved under guard by special travel arrangements] to an FGU [Federal State Institution] IK-3 [IK: corrective colony, short for corrective labor colony, i.e., labor camp] at the village of Kharp in the Yamalo-Nenets AO [autonomous okrug, i.e., district], situated beyond the Arctic Circle. However, the Russian Federation Justice Ministry No. 346/254 List of Medical Contraindications for the serving of sentences in certain parts of the Russian Federation by offenders sentenced to imprisonment, a list that was enacted under an Order of the Public Health Ministry of the Russian Federation, reads: "The medical contraindications for serving of sentences in: ... the Yamalo-Nenets autonomous okrug are: ...chronic recurrent and progressive conditions of the digestive organs (chronic active hepatitis...)".

We feel it necessary to draw your attention to the fact that Platon Lebedev suffers from serious chronic conditions, including hepatitis, which becomes acute on a regular basis. The diagnosis for Platon Lebedev has been confirmed by medical experts and documented several times.

Furthermore, Article 73 of the RF Correctional Code provides for the convicted offender to serve his or her sentence in the constituent territory of the federation in which he or she has been living or has committed the crime.

However, neither Lebedev nor Khodorkovsky has been sent to serve their sentences in a colony in Moscow or the Moscow Region (Khodorkovsky is currently in colony IK-10 (YaG 14/10) in the town of Krasnokamensk in the Chita region). The reason given is that the Moscow Region has no suitable colony at all, but this does not seem to us to be adequately convincing.

In light of the facts and statutes cited above, as well as in the name of protecting a fundamental human right – the right to life – we appeal to you to take into account the gravity of the medical condition of Platon Lebedev and look into whether it is possible to have him transferred to a penal colony with a more congenial climate, for example, one in Moscow or the Moscow Region.

We also urge you to change the penitentiary facility where Mikhail Khodorkovsky is being held for a colony in Moscow or the Moscow Region.

Sincerely yours,

Sovest independent non-governmental group:

I SIGN TOO!

This appeal was joined by:

Ludmila Alekseeva, Helsinky Group, Moscow
Evgenia Albats, journalist, Moscow
Andrey Babushkin, member of the Council Representative at the Ministry of Justice, Moscow
Nikita Belykh, party SPS ("Union of the Right Forces"), Moscow
Evgeny Bounimovich, party "Yabloko", Moscow
Grigory Djibladze, Centre of the Democracy Development and Human Rights Protection, Moscow
Garri Kasparov, "Committee 2008", OGF ("United Civil Front"), Moscow
Alexey Kondaurov, deputy of State Duma, Moscow
Sergey Mitrokhin, party "Yabloko", Moscow
Alexey Navalny, party "Yabloko", Moscow
Boris Nadezhdin, party SPS ("Union of the Right Forces"), Moscow
Alexander Nikitin, ecologist, St. Petersburg
Elena Panfilova, Transparency International, Moscow
Grigory Pasko, journalist, Russia
Georgy Saratov, Fond INDEM, Moscow
Ivan Starikov, Democratic Party of Russia, Moscow
Irina Khakamada, party "Nash Vybor" ("Our Choice"), Democratic Party of Russia, Moscow
Victor Shenderovich, writer, "Committee 2008", Moscow
Alexey Yablokov, party "Zelenaya Rossia" ("Green Russia"), Moscow
Grigory Yavlinsky, party "Yabloko", Moscow
Igor Yakovenko, General Secretary of the Union of Journalists of Russia, Moscow
Gleb Yakunin, priest, Moscow

The complete list of signature is available here (in Russian)

Jailed Menatep Owner Receives Support Letter From European MPs

2005-12-08T01:28:00.000Z

The European Parliament has sent jailed businessman Platon Lebedev a letter expressing support to the former director of Menatep Group, convicted for eight years in the Yukos case. The letter published by Lebedev’s press centre Thursday was originally timed to coincide with his 49th birthday on Nov. 29.

In the letter the MPs congratulated Lebedev on his birthday, and said they hoped his next birthday would be spent in a happier environment.

“We are very sorry that in spite of your country’s laws that you have to spend this day far from your family and home… We hope that you can celebrate your next birthday in good contitions, surrounded by family, children and grandchildren.”

The parliamentarians assured Lebedev of their support in the European Council.

“We assure you that we will most attentively continue to follow your case and your movements on the legal field. We will also do our best to attract attention of the European Council.”

“We are anxiously looking at your imprisonment and the recent move to the Vorkuta district. One of our colleagues, Milan Khoracek, observed the trial of you and Mikhail Khodorkovsky in May, and left Moscow certain that the regulations that could have guaranteed a safe and justified verdict had not been followed.”

“We are concerned that you gain access to the possibilities, guaranteed to you by you state’s international obligations, allowing a new fair trial under fair conditions, including a possible appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.

”Meanwhile, we hope that you are allowed to see your family in the penal colony, or that you will be moved to a colony nearer your home,“ the letter concluded.

The letter was signed by 31 MPs from Germany, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Belgium, Luxemburg, Great Britain, Austria, Spain, Italy, Danemark, Malta, Sweden and Ireland.

Moscow News, 12.08.2005

Booker Prize Dumps Khodorkovsky

2005-12-07T01:25:00.000Z

Open Russia NGO said the Russian Booker foundation is no longer workingwith them. Oddly enough, an independent literature prize has given up its sponsor, not vice versa.

Russian Booker was set up in 1992 and was sponsored by 1996 by Booker, British commercial firm. The awards have been called Booker Open Russian since 2002 when the new sponsor appeared.

The decision to freeze contacts with Open Russia was taken before the announcement of the winner of Booker 2005. A statement of the change of the major sponsor was made on Open Russia’s website on the day after the awards ceremony. The reason cited is the situation around Open Russia – the foundation’s chairman Mikhail Khodorkovsky is behind the bars, while the police search at the organization’s offices. Open Russian understands the position of Booker but says it is still willing to finance the awards for a number of years.

The organization committee of the Russian Booker Awards confirmed the news. Igor Shaytanov, secretary of the committee, admitted that the contract was suspended on their initiative and noted that the agreement between the two organizations was signed annually but “none of the parties gave any guarantees for a period more than a year. The official said that the foundation had received a proposal for a long-term cooperation back in October.

Novelist Vasily Aksenov, chairman of the jury of Booker 2005, reacted to the news citing Lermontov: “The love was joyless, the parting will bear no grief.”

Kommersant, 12.07.2005

Krasnokamensk Penal Colony Administration Hinders Work of Defense Lawyers

2005-11-27T00:39:00.000Z

Albert Mkrtychev, Denis Dyatlev, Elena Levina and Irina Khrunova, four of Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s defense lawyers, last week visited penal colony FGU IK 10 in the town of Krasnokamensk to meet with their client and provide him with legal assistance.

However the colony administration’s attitude towards the lawyers has changed dramatically since their last visit to the colony two weeks ago. The penal colony administration had earlier abided by the law with regard to the procedures for meetings of lawyers and their client. This time, the colony administration imposed procedures that were aimed at infringing upon the rights of the lawyers and the client, as well as impeding the court appeal on specific violations.

After setting up an additional checkpoint over a hundred meters away from the entrance to the colony, the lawyers were not able to record the fact and time of their arrival. They were then kept waiting in the cold because the colony administration had not “noticed” their presence.

The colony administration allowed the lawyers to see their client strictly one at a time despite the fact that there is no law prohibiting visits to the client by the defense attorney team as a whole. This means that from the outset Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s rights were violated since he was unable to have an exchange of views with his attorneys on the case and thus develop a joint position in discussion with them. Furthermore, the lawyers were unable to confirm unlawful behavior by prison officials in any way including witness testimony by fellow prison employees.

Before the meeting with their client, the lawyers faced a preliminary series of questions during which time they were asked to answer question on how long the visit to their client would last (although by law they are allowed to have one four-hour discussion per day). In addition, the visit of one of the attorneys was abruptly ended with no reason given. During their stay in Krasnokamensk (a total of three days), all the lawyers communicated with their client for about five hours altogether.

Before and after meeting with Khodorkovsky, every lawyer, in violation of legal requirements, was subjected to a so-called “personal search” procedure. This was in fact a body search during which some of the lawyers had to hand over their clothes, belts and shoes, while the others had to hand over items of their underwear for this “personal search.” This so-called “personal search” was held without any witnesses being present; in the course of the search, colony representatives in violation of the law refused to give any reasons for it or to record the fact that the search was undertaken or record any findings.

In violation of Article 8 of the law on Advocacy and the bar in the Russian Federation and Article 6 of Code of professional ethics for lawyers, administration officials at the entrance to and exit from the colony’s territory repeatedly tried to examine the defense team’s confidential materials, including lawyers’ records on their client’s case, thereby compromising the lawyers’ professional confidentiality. Moreover, the personal papers and documents of lawyer Albert Mkrtychev were seized when he left the territory of the colony. Colony officials had already examined these documents when he entered the restricted area and nothing caused them to issue any warnings at that point.

The colony administration and staff paid special attention to confidential notes including the lawyers’ private notes made by them during their talk with Mikhail Khodorkovsky. According to the colony’s administration, officials have the right to look through the notes “for the purpose of preventing terrorist attacks”. And following the thorough examination and attempts to decode the transcripts made by Elena Levina, the colony administrator requested that the lawyers give a written promise that they would agree “to speak and write only in Russian”.

The lawyers were also given to understand unambiguously that non-compliance with any of the unlawful demands by the colony administration would result in making it impossible to communicate with their client for “objective” reasons.

The defense lawyers are conscious of the need to continue to provide Mikhail Khodorkovsky with legal assistance. However, in their opinion and in the opinion of their colleagues in Russia and abroad this situation is absolutely unprecedented.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky's Press Center, 11.22.2005

Rosneft hires YUKOS ex-spokesman as IPO adviser

2005-11-14T20:13:00.000Z

MOSCOW, Nov 14 (Reuters) - Russian state oil firm Rosneft has hired former YUKOS spokesman Hugo Erikssen to advise on plans for an initial public offering, his consultancy Mmd said on Monday.
Erikssen headed YUKOS's international public relations team from 1999 until 2004, when bailiffs seized its core production unit, Yuganskneftegaz, in lieu of unpaid back taxes and sold it to Rosneft.

Mmd said in a statement it had been appointed by Rosneft as global coordinator of public relations, public affairs and investor relations, with Erikssen taking responsibility for the Rosneft account.

Erikssen joins a number of senior YUKOS managers to jump ship to Rosneft, including Sergei Kudryashov, who used to run Yuganskneftegaz, and Alexander Sapronov, YUKOS's former head of logistics.

YUKOS fell victim to what many analysts believe was a Kremlin drive to destroy its ambitious chief executive Mikhail Khodorkovsky and restore state control over strategic energy resources.

Khodorkovsky was convicted in May of fraud and tax evasion and has begun an eight-year sentence in a Siberian penal colony.

Yahoo! News, 11.14.2005

Khodorkovsky Sets Out Vision for 2020

2005-11-14T20:06:00.000Z

By Catherine Belton
Staff Writer
Mikhail Khodorkovsky attacked President Vladimir Putin's regime in a withering missive from his east Siberian prison camp that said time was up for the "parasitic" policies of the current elite and, for the first time, presented what appeared to be his own manifesto for the presidency.

In his first major article since he was sent to serve out his sentence in the remote Chita region near the Chinese border, Khodorkovsky called for Putin to step down "not a day before nor an hour later" than the legal end of his term in 2008. He called for a "new responsible elite" to run the country in place of the bureaucrats who he said currently sought office only for the opportunity to win assets. Without a major shift toward more paternalistic, left-wing economic policies, the country is heading toward collapse, he said.

"This parasitic approach no longer works," he wrote in the article, which took up a full page in Kommersant on Friday. "The country is not capable of being competitive, and the strategic reserve of endurance and infrastructure built up from the Soviet era has run out."

Attempts by the Kremlin to justify its authoritarian rule by encouraging extremist groups would lead to "sorry" consequences and long-term instability, he said.

The photo that accompanied the article, showing Khodorkovsky dressed in a black prison uniform with his head shaved, bent over a wooden desk as he wrote in an exercise book, was a stark reminder of the former oil tycoon's rapid fall from power. But the article, titled "Left Turn-2," appeared to be a clear bid for a place in the political sun and his strongest personal challenge yet to Putin's regime.

Picking up from his last newspaper article, in which he called a "left turn" the only way to avoid a major sociopolitical backlash, Khodorkovsky set out a 12-year economic plan that called for nearly $1 trillion in investments from the state and private sector to be plowed into improvements in infrastructure, education and science.

Under the subheading "Program 2020," he called for the return of elections for regional governors and for the first time openly called for the creation of a parliamentary republic -- a goal he was believed to be pursuing before his arrest in October 2003.

Some have seen the legal attack against Khodorkovsky as a campaign to crush his political ambitions, but the Kremlin has portrayed the fraud and tax evasion case as a just battle against a robber baron.

In contrast to the rebellious Decembrist officers whom Tsar Nicholas I sent into exile and political isolation in Chita in 1825, Khodorkovsky's supporters hope he may yet be able to influence the country's political discourse.

"He might be far away near the uranium mines, but in this modern age it will be much harder to cut him off," said Irina Khakamada, a liberal politician and former presidential candidate who backed Khodorkovsky's abortive bid for a State Duma seat in September.

While Khodorkovsky's calls for a large increase in state spending appeared populist, his political analysis was spot on, Khakamada said, adding that she agreed with those who thought his harsh prison sentence could enhance his political standing.

Underlining that he believed his managerial skills were superior to Putin's, Khodorkovsky said talk of a "personnel crisis" in government needed debunking. He said the current system, which is based on unquestioning loyalty to the president, was the source of the crisis. "I have experience in building the strongest Russian corporation: Yukos," he said. "And if this company grew from a condition of post-Soviet collapse to reach the level of a world giant with a capitalization of $40 billion, then this was mainly due to personnel policy.

"If we, like the Kremlin does today, relied on job seekers' ability to look loyally into their boss' eyes and carry his briefcase, then Yukos would not have existed for long," he said.

"Drawing up the correct criteria for selecting top personnel is vital. ... The Kremlin chooses people according to a federal criterion of 100 percent loyalty and pliancy. A capable person cannot be 100 percent pliable -- that is a fate reserved for those who are without talent and are motivated only by money."

Painting a dire picture of the country's infrastructure, he said the Kremlin's policies had caused it to lose control over the North Caucasus, and said the military was in a state of collapse. He compared the situation in the Kremlin to a famous Brezhnev-era joke that told of apparatchiks shaking their leader's windowless, rusty train car on the spot in an effort to convince him that it was moving.

While Putin has sought to avoid the inflationary effects of ramping up state spending, Khodorkovsky proposed using the state's windfall from high oil prices to boost economic growth and living standards. He called for investments of $50 billion to rebuild the armed forces, and said $10 billion in financial incentives for families to have more children could raise the population to between 220 million and 230 million.

He also proposed levying a windfall tax on businessmen who, like himself, won their enterprises in the controversial privatizations of the 1990s. Likening the tax to one imposed by British Prime Minister Tony Blair's government, he said it would legitimize businesses' holdings and calculated that it could raise $30 billion to $35 billion in three to four years.

The Moscow Times, 11.14.2005

Oligarch plots political revenge from jail - Sunday Times - Times Online

2005-11-14T19:18:00.000Z

Mark Franchetti, Moscow

THE former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was arrested after declaring his opposition to President Vladimir Putin, will launch a career in politics when he is released at the end of his eight-year sentence for fraud and tax evasion, his wife has revealed.
Inna Khodorkovskaya said that far from being shattered by his incarceration in a remote Siberian prison colony, he is determined to dedicate his life to securing political reform.

“Of course he’ll do politics when he comes out,” said Khodorkovskaya in her first interview with a western newspaper. “That’s the way he is. He wants to change this society, that’s for sure. And just by being there in jail, with his presence alone, he is already changing it. You’ll see.

“He is not broken. On the contrary he’s even stronger. He is very focused and is in it for the long haul. Support for him is growing and will continue to grow as people understand that he is different from other so-called oligarchs. People in Russia are starting to wake up.”

Her comments coincided with a 12-year plan to modernise Russia that her husband unveiled last Friday in the opposition paper Kommersant. It calls for measures to curb corruption and create a “paternalistic” government that would aim to treble gross domestic product, boost the population by nearly 80m and create new armed forces.

In full-page newspaper advertisements the previous week, Khodorkovsky demanded a new breed of officials, “those interested in the fate of the country and its people, not their own unbridled personal enrichment”. “The country needs a new political elite — heroes, not mediocrity,” he added.

Khodorkovskaya, 36, spoke out after seeing her 42-year-old husband for the first time in the prison colony where he is expected to remain until 2011.

After his arrest in 2003 Khodorkovsky, who built a personal fortune of £4.5 billion, was held in an overcrowded Moscow jail for two years.

In a campaign orchestrated by the Kremlin, he was stripped of Yukos, his oil company, and much of his fortune.

Last month he was sent more than 3,000 miles east of Moscow by train to penal colony YaG 14/10, in Krasnokamensk, a uranium-polluted area of Siberia. For 10 days his wife and children had no idea where he was.

“I read in the press that he had been sent as far away as possible but I hoped it wasn’t true,” said Khodorkovskaya, who once worked for her him as an accountant.

“My heart was racing when I received the letter from the prison authorities stating where he was. Until the very end I hoped the papers were wrong and that he’d been sent closer to home. They dispatched him so far away because they want to isolate him. They want people to forget about him.”

A few days later she set off on her own arduous journey to Krasnokamensk — six hours by plane and 10 hours by car across Siberia’s desolate steppes. The colony, where more than 1,000 inmates are serving sentences for theft and fraud, opened in the 1960s when prisoners were used to build one of the Soviet Union’s largest uranium processing plants.

The area is heavily contaminated with radioactive waste. and in winter the temperatures drop to -40C. The summers are stiflingly hot and the colony becomes infested with mosquitoes. Tuberculosis is rife.

Khodorkovsky, who lived in a luxurious Moscow villa and travelled by limousine and private jet, now sleeps in a bunk bed in one of 13 army-style barracks and shares his dormitory with about 100 other men.

He is woken at 6am and puts on a black uniform bearing his surname, initials and the number 8, to identify his barrack. Number 8 is said to house the colony’s blatniye, or bandits, its most powerful inmates.
During Khodorkovsky’s detention in Moscow his wife was allowed to visit him only once a month for 45 minutes. They talked by telephone through a thick partition of glass and metallic netting.

Visiting rules are more relaxed at the colony. Like the other inmates, Khodorkovsky is allowed four three-day visits a year and six visits of three hours each. For the longer visits the prisoners and their families are locked in a rundown Soviet-era building where they have a room measuring 9ft by 9ft and access to a small communal bathroom and kitchen. Khodorkovskaya used this to cook a pan of fried potatoes, one of her husband’s favourite dishes.

“It’s difficult to find the words to explain what it felt like to be with him for the first time after so long. It filled me with new energy and strength to face the future,” said Khodorkovskaya, who arrived at the colony carrying a bag full of fresh vegetables, boiled meat, clothes and Russian music CDs from the tycoon’s collection.

“He’s changed a lot but I recognised the man I knew before his arrest,” she added. “He has become even more determined. He is very calm and far more philosophical about life. Before he was always focused on his work. Now he believes that the family is what matters most.

“He is not consumed by anger. Instead he is a man with a clear vision. He is feeling combative.”

Khodorkovskaya, who is shy of publicity, said that her husband had joked about the fact that he will be made to sew mittens. As the only graduate there he will also give classes in business and science.

He has subscribed to half a dozen newspapers and asked for several books, ranging from theological and academic texts to novels, including Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

The couple have a 14-year-old daughter Natasha and six-year-old twin boys Ilya and Gleb. Khodorkovsky probably will not see them again until he is freed as he and his wife believe that the trip would be too traumatic for them. Instead, he has opted to exchange the shorter family visits for telephone calls to his children.

“He has no regrets. Nor do I,” said Khodorkovskaya. “Neither of us would have wanted to flee abroad. Russia is our country. They will never break him. He is a man who is going places.”

Sunday Times - Times Online, 11.14.2005

____________________
How many times I'll have to say that there was no private jet and luxurious villa...

A Renegade Looks Beyond Siberia

2005-11-14T19:01:00.000Z

Former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky is up for parole in '07, but his release is unlikely with Putin in power

"I have been in the land of the Decembrists, political prisoners subjected to hard labor and uranium mines," declared Russia's best-known prisoner, drawing a parallel between himself and famous Russian dissidents of the past. In full-page advertisements in major Western newspapers on Nov. 2, former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, now serving an eight-year sentence at the remote Krasnokamensk Penal Colony in Siberia, sketched a vision for "Russia's development for the 21st century," including "a new political elite" willing to "say 'no' to the repressive machinery of a criminal bureaucracy."

A political manifesto? Or a desperate bid for survival? Possibly both. Three of Khodorkovsky's former business associates, who underwrote the advertisements, say concern for his safety is the main motive for the publicity. "There is a conspiracy not only to isolate him but also to kill him," claimed Leonid Nevzlin, a former partner at a recent press conference in Tel Aviv, where he fled after a Russian warrant was issued for his arrest in 2004. Conditions in Russian prisons can be dangerous, and Khodorkovsky's backers fear a nearby uranium mine may have released radiation, though the authorities deny it.

Principles Over Profit
Whether or not the former chairman of oil giant Yukos is genuinely fearful for his life, his lawyers vow to take his case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. They will argue that he is a political prisoner and didn't get a fair trial. At the same time it looks as if Khodorkovsky, who was convicted of tax evasion and fraud after financing opposition political parties two years ago, still has political ambitions. Long-standing Moscow rumor has it that Khodorkovsky could have avoided prison and stayed in business had he been willing to cut a deal and flee the country. He even has a business to run. Group Menatep, the holding company he and his partners created, has assets abroad -- including GTS Central Europe, which owns telecom service providers in the region, and a 26% stake in Modgal Industries Ltd., which controls a leading Israeli petrochemicals producer. But last January, Khodorkovsky handed his 60% stake in Menatep to Nevzlin. "Prison will rescue Khodorkovsky from his oligarchic image and turn him into a politician of the new generation," says Stanislav Belkovsky, a political analyst linked to the left-wing opposition.

Behind bars, Khodorkovsky has been active politically. In September he ran for parliament but was disqualified after a court upheld his conviction. Supporters say he's working on a political program to be published soon. "His voice will ring like a bell in the political desert created by the present authorities," says Ivan Starikov, a leader of the opposition Union of Right Forces who managed Khodorkovsky's parliamentary campaign.

Yet if he is serious about a political career, he must overcome the hostility of the Russian public. In his statements, he has been leaning to the left, denouncing poverty and social injustice as well as authoritarianism. He has called for "a broad social-democratic coalition" including Communists and right-wing pro-market groups. But so far, few ordinary Russians seem impressed. An October opinion poll by Moscow's independent Levada Center found that only 18% of Russians sympathize with Khodorkovsky -- and 67% don't. "As a so-called oligarch, such a figure is disliked by most of the population," says Levada analyst Boris Dubin. Perhaps sympathy for Khodorkovsky will grow the longer he languishes in Siberia. His sentence ends in 2011. But while he's eligible for parole in 2007, his team isn't optimistic. "I fear that as long as Putin and the people around him are in the Kremlin, there's no chance of Khodorkovsky being released," says his lawyer, Yuri Schmidt.

Even after 2008, when President Vladimir V. Putin is due to retire, most analysts believe Putin will remain a key political figure, with close allies still controlling the Kremlin. "The Kremlin wants to decide who the political leaders will be, and this restricts the democratic process," says Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet dissident who is now an Israeli politician. That doesn't augur well for Khodorkovsky's political aspirations. Still, his supporters hope that public opinion will one day turn against the Kremlin, either because of economic problems or because voters become fed up with authoritarian methods of rule. The former tycoon can't run for office from prison, but he's only 42 years old, and Russian politics are always unpredictable. Three years ago few would have guessed that the country's richest man would now be sewing mailbags in a Siberian jail cell.

Business Week, 11.14.2005

Kommersant: Mikhail Khodorkovsky Writes Program 2020

2005-11-13T02:23:00.000Z

Prisoner YaG 14/10, former owner of YUKOS Mikhail Khodorkovsky, has shown that he intends to continue his political activity in prison. He has given Kommersant an article outlining a concept for the modernization of Russia. “The left turn,” he says, entails combining democratic methods of government with state paternalism.
Some of the theses of Khodorkovsky’s program and the characterization of the political situation in Russia were also included in an interview published yesterday in the French Politique Internationale. Khodorkovsky severely criticizes the “Putin system” in which “absolutely everything, from the railroad police to the days off in the prisons, depends on the tastes, moods and whims of one man.” Khodorkovsky is no less decisively critical of the opposition, which, in his opinion, is in a deep crisis. “The causes of this crisis are that today the opposition parties are headed not by statesmen but by people whom I would call businessmen from politics,” he said. They is not striving for power but only to “trade political claims” for the “goodwill of the Kremlin.”

The real opposition, Khodorkovsky says, will first form “on the left flank.” But only a coalition is capable to taking over per from the present authorities, headed by politicians, “liberals in the economic plan and socially left.” They will meet the hopes of the active part of Russian society. “Those hopes are expressed simultaneously in the desire for more social justice and a real market economy,” the former oligarch explained.

In the article by Khodorkovsky published today in Kommersant, Khodorkovsky outlines his plans for the modernization of Russia by 2020 and the legitimization of the privatization of property in the 1990s.

by Andrey Kochetov
______________________
LINK TO Mikhail Khodorkovsky's article on the MBKh Society Site

Kommersant 11.11.2005

Krasnokamensk in 2001

2005-11-10T02:53:00.000Z

On the Road to Russia's Rich Wasteland
A Uranium Mine's Mother Lode of RealityAugust 8, 2001
By Robert G. Kaiser, The Washington Post
Reprinted with permission from Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive and The Washington Post.

KRASNOKAMENSK, Russia (Aug. 2) – Look down into the enormous hole and play a mind game: From this giant excavation into the rolling Mongolian steppe, less than 25 miles from the spot where the Russian, Chinese and Mongolian borders intersect, came the uranium that went into most of the Soviet Union's thermonuclear warheads, the ones aimed at the United States during the Cold War. The thought occurs that this gigantic hole, nearly a mile long, three-fourths of a mile wide, and 330 yards deep, would resemble the holes that exploding hydrogen bombs might have created in downtown Washington.

But that's just a daydream. In reality this hole, a giant pock mark in the steppe, is visible evidence that this remote corner of Siberia has been home for three decades to one of the world's largest uranium mines and processing plants. Mountains of tailings scattered across the steppe are another piece of evidence. The company town of Krasnokamensk, built from nothing at all to house 65,000 isolated people, is a third.

Uranium mining isn't what the Russian adventurers who conquered Siberia had in mind. They came for furs – sable and fox. Sable was the most prized accessory in the courts of Europe. Two pelts of black fox could be traded in 17th Century Russia for 50 acres of land, a cabin, five horses, 10 head of cattle, 20 sheep and dozens of chickens. Most of those adventurers were cossacks, a hearty breed of Russians who had pioneered the fertile South in earlier centuries, where they (alone among their countrymen) avoided the system of serfdom that helped hold back Russian development for so long.

Cossacks elected their own leaders, and took great pride in their self-sufficiency and energetic determination. Amazingly, the Cossacks who conquered Siberia did so in less than 70 years, moving 3,000 miles from the Ural mountains to the Pacific Ocean, across an expanse that in the modern world spans five time zones. They reached the Pacific in 1648.

There are still fox and sable in Siberia, in much smaller numbers than 300 years ago. But today's wealth is in Krasnokamensk's uranium, Chita's forests, Buryatia's gold, Irkutsk's natural gas, Norilsk's palladium and Surgut's huge reservoirs of oil. Siberia's wealth is Russia's wealth; without it, Russia's future would be grim. But with it the Russians have a chance to regain a considerable part of the stature and influence in the world they have lost in the last ten years-provided they can learn how to exploit these riches effectively.

Poisonous Lakes

If anyone ever offers you a day trip to Krasnokamensk, the wise response might be "nyet, spasibo" – no thanks. Not that it isn't a great adventure to come to this moonscape on the edge of the world, where the grassy steppe looks like split-pea soup spiced with flakes of pepper (the brown spots caused by a terrible drought this year). But to make the trip to and from the nearest outpost of civilization – Chita, capital of the gargantuan Chita oblast of southernmost Siberia – you need an uninterrupted 26-hour day.

We set out from Chita at 4 a.m. Chita Oblast (most of Russia's provincial jurisdictions, many of them bigger than powerful countries, are called oblasts) is part of the great expanse of Russian territory that was closed to foreigners in the Soviet era. Westerners in Moscow used to wonder if the Soviet authorities closed such places out of fear that traveling foreigners might learn real state secrets, or out of embarrassment for what they might see. Our trip here lends support to the "embarrassment" camp. The view from the window of our van was considerably worse now than it would have been ten years ago. Like most of Siberia, Chita is in the midst of an economic depression fully the equal of America's in the 1930s.

Seventy percent of the oblast's economic enterprises have collapsed since the Soviet Union disappeared. Abandoned factories, crumbling before your eyes, are a common sight. Even the surviving enterprises look like they are crumbling – reminders of the staggering infrastructure problems the new Russia faces.

The road to Krasnokamensk is a narrow ribbon of asphalt most of the way, its surface varying from smooth to potholed to a jaw-rattling washboard and back to smooth again – except during the last 100 miles or so of a trip about 450 miles long. That last stretch, leading to what was recently the world's largest uranium processing and mining facility (it now ranks fifth), is a dirt road, and not even a good one.road, but rather one packed with stones the sizes of tennis and golf balls Most travelers, we learned, use the train to get to Krasnokamensk, a 15-hour journey from Chita, but a smooth one. (Soviet-era air service to the city is now a dim memory.)

This could be the Russian definition of a company town. Without "the enterprise," as everyone here calls it (its real name is the Krasnokamensk Hydroelectrical Factory), this would be pristine steppe, as it was before the 1960s. And when the uranium runs out, perhaps in as little as 25 years, it will likely be impossible to sustain this community at all.

We were met by German Nikolayevich Kolov, 42, the deputy administrator of the city and until several years ago the chief engineer of the enterprise. Wary at first – the enterprise was still closed to outsiders, he said – he agreed that we could tour key installations from the outside. But without the general director's permission we could not be shown any interiors, and the general director was out of town.

That tour took us to the big hole, the first mine in Krasnokamensk, which was exploited for 20 years until almost fully depleted. Now ore is mined from underground seams, more than two dozen of them in the area. The hole, dry and empty, looks like the foundation for an enormous, un-built building. (Environmental activists in Chita say there are persistent rumors that some of the nuclear wastes Russia has agreed to accept, for large fees, from other countries could end up here.) Nearby, vast hills of tailings, at least 500 feet high, dominate the landscape.

From another high vantage point on a hill several miles from the hole we could see three big lakes created to hold the liquified waste produced by uranium processing. These wastes contain sulfuric acid used to separate uranium from its ore, and radioactive traces of uranium and other heavy metals. According to Paul Robinson, research director of the Southwest Research and Information Center in Albequerque, NM, and an expert on uranium extraction who was invited to Krasnokamensk in 1996, the enterprise's then-chief ecologist acknowledged there was a problem with leakage from the ponds (lined with clay and plastic) that hold these wastes. The city's drinking water was threatened, Robinson was told.

The enterprise was badly burned by a documentary made in 1994 by a team from Greenpeace, which came to Krasnokamensk pretending to be journalists from Swedish television. Greenpeace charged that the enterprise flagrantly violated accepted norms for dealing with uranium, exposed its workers to unnecessary danger, and allowed some residents of the city to live in homes whose radon levels were many times higher than is considered tolerable for humans. Robinson concluded that while the enterprise has significant environmental problems, the Greenpeace report was exaggerated.

In their conversations with us, city and enterprise officials spoke at length about the extensive safety precautions they take. But they also acknowledged that people still live in a part of town where radon levels are sometimes astoundingly high, and said that for years the enterprise has been trying to get authorities in Moscow to pay to relocate those people.

Vodka and Dancers

Kolov, a six-footer who could easily tip the scales at 300 pounds, insisted that we accept his hispitality, and his insistence carried a good deal of weight. So on to the Alfa Restaurant, a city-owned enterprise recently spiffed up. In the big cities now, the restaurants are in private hands, sometimes very talented ones, but capitalism is moving slowly in Siberia.

In Krasnokamensk the Soviet Union still survives, in spirit if not in fact. When the enterprise recently celebrated is 30th year in full operation, the most productive workers won cars – the modern version of a Soviet medal. Enterprise employees are still sent on free vacations to nearby "resorts." The spread at the Alfa was extensive. Kolov, it soon became evident, welcomed the visit by foreigners as an excuse to tuck into some local specialties himself, including a bit of vodka. At his instruction, members of a famous local dance company had been invited to the Alfa to put on a demonstration of their considerable talents for the visitors. They went through half a dozen costume changes and danced to blaring recorded music in impressive synchronicity.

Over dinner Kolov disclosed a secret. "We're building a church," he revealed, an ambitious Russian Orthodox cathedral with seven onion-shaped cupolas, right in the heart of downtown. It will cost 400 million rubles (or about $15 million), the cost to be shared equally by four backers: the church, the enterprise, the city government and the oblast government. Kolov expects the church to cause quite a sensation when people realize what it is.

Return

Viktor, our driver, went out in search of two new spare tires, and at 8 p.m., after much jovial conversation involving Kolov, his press secretary and a local journalist who could not stop bragging about the tomatoes grow in Krasnokamensk, we were back in the van. About 20 miles out of town on the dirt highway back to Chita, a colossal moon the color of pale butter appeared suddenly above the rolling steppe, rising in the gray dusk of a long Siberian day. Under the nearly-full moon, the pale green and brown steppe – part of the land that nurtured Genghis Khan and his descendants, once the world's greatest warriors – seemed for that moment to be boundless, infinite. But it wasn't – in barely nine hours, we were back in Chita.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky's official Press Center, 11.10.2005

Prisoner OG 98/3

2005-11-04T02:26:00.000Z

Kommersant visited the correctional facility where Platon Lebedev is doing his
Yesterday, the medical office of the Correctional Facility of Minimum Security No.3 in Harp for a first time received from the attorneys Evgeny Baru and Konstantin Rivkin the medicines for inmate Platon Lebedev. And guards arrested Kommersant's photo reporter Vasily Shaposhnikov, when he tried to make a shot of the fence.

Uniformed Hat

In the morning, attorneys Baru and Rivkin went to the market. They were looking for a hat for Platon Lebedev. This task was not simple, however. In the correctional facility there was no hat of the right size for Platon Lebedev. The lawyers were permitted to buy a hat and to give it to the inmate, but the hat should meet all necessary standards. It cannot be from expensive fur. It has to be black and not tall -- so inmate Lebedev while standing in the row would not look different than other inmates. In stores and markets of the village Harp there was no such hat. However, the prison doctor took the medicines for Lebedev, which for some reason Moscow prison refused to take. The doctor signed for the medicines and promised to give them to Lebedev every time when he would write a request for the medicine. In other words, in order to get a pill the inmate should ask a written permission.

After long negotiations with the head of the correctional facility Alexander Zadorozhny, the attorneys received permission to send a watch and shaving safe razor to Lebedev. Also, the attorneys could buy a TV, but they cannot give it directly to the inmate, but to the whole 12th Regiment, where Lebedev would be living and working. Also, the lawyers have a right to subscribe to newspapers and magazines for Platon Lebedev. On the local post office Baru they subscribed for the inmate several political and entertaining publications, as well as a collection of Japanese crosswords, which Lebedev likes a lot.

Problematic Prisoner

"We subscribed the newspapers and magazines for you for the first quarter of 2006," Attorney Baru told his client through the glass during the evening meeting.

"Why did you get so greedy?" asked Lebedev from behind the glass. "Why only for one quarter?"

The lawyer just shrugged his shoulders. This short subscription probably shows the resolve of the attorneys to get Platon Lebedev to some other correctional facilities in a warmer place.

Then, the lawyers started to show Platon Lebedev through the glass some documents. They were pressing papers against the glass and Lebedev was reading them. Especially he was interested by the statement of Vladimir Putin. For easier reading Lebedev took off a temporary hat made from the felt.

"You look like a skin-head," Baru said.

The lawyer complained to the head of the correctional labor facility Zadorozhny that it is very difficult to work like that, when he had to press every document to the glass for his client to read. And the head of the prison showed lawyers a scale model of tank and self propelled cannon artfully made from the semi-precious stones and also complained. First of all, the prison head complained that it takes a lot of time for upbringing a good master with the stones. Unfortunately, today's prison terms are less and less. Second, he was complaining that he would like to provide normal conditions required by the law for the meeting with the attorneys' client (a separate room and a desk), but he doesn't have neither. Baru had even impression that Zadorozhny is not really happy with appearance of inmate Lebedev --there are too many problems from him in correctional facility and in the village as well. And the main problem is the journalists.

The Guarded Territory

Yesterday, for instance, the photo reporter of Kommersant Vasily Shaposhnikov got up early and went to Harp hoping to make good shots there. In the entrance to the village Shaposhnikov made a shot of the pole with the plaque "Harp -Northern Lights -Welcome." In the village he made a shot of the fence with the barbed wire and then another fence like that. Actually, it was the same fence only the long one. Shaposhnikov decided to make a third shot of the same fence, but, this time, it was a mistake. He took a position next to a indiscrete fiv-story building. However it was not a residential apartment building but the local office of Federal Penitentiary Service. There was a security camera. Actually all the houses in Harp have these security cameras.

A patrol arrived immediately and asked Shaposhnikov to get out of the car. The cab driver had o get out as well and the patrol convoyed both of them to the entrance of the correctional facility. The cab driver was complaining that he gets paid for the time and for that reason he can't go to jail, so he was quickly interrogated first and then released.

The interrogation of Vasily Shaposhnikov was enthusiastic.

"Are you first time in Harp?" the officer was asking.

"No, we were here yesterday," said photo reporter.

It was true. We came to the village yesterday to the local writer Pyotr Kozhevnikov and asked about the place. Shaposhnikov, unfortunately, did not remember name of the writer.

"Who did you visit? What was the goal of the visit?"

"I don't remember, some sort of guy. The correspondent was talking to him and I left because they were smoking there too much."

"Tell us the number of the house and the number of the apartment."

"I don't remember," Shaposhnikov answered. "Honestly, the cab delivered me there."

"Do you remember what the floor was, at least?"

Shaposhnikov didn't.

While answering the questions of the officer, Shaposhnikov named me, and gave my name and my address in hotel. Also, the Kommersant photo reporter said that the attorneys of Lebedev were traveling with us in one train and they live in the same hotel too, but he couldn’t remember the names of the lawyers.

The photographer was allowed to make a phone call. He called me:

“Valery, I was arrested. Now, I am with Lebedev in the same jail. Come, get me out.”

I went to save the comrade. And the officer decided that there is not much of a use of Shaposhnikov, so he started to tell him what to write on the explanation paper so he wouldn’t get criminally charged.

“Write that you came without any preparation and made shots from unprepared earlier points,” the officer suggested. “Otherwise, it might look as the prepared operation. Write that you did not have an agreement with the cab driver how to drive, or it would look like a conspiracy planned by the group of people.

First, they wanted to transfer photo reporter to the local police precinct, but then, the senior officer came and ordered Shaposhnikov released because of his first time being arrested. According to the photographer description, the senior officer was Zadorozhny himself.

Four hours after I arrived to the gates of the correctional facility. Shaposhnikov was brought to the gates by a mean-looking officer. He told me: “This is specially guarded territory. There are dangerous criminals kept in here who are doing 25 years. Photography is considered as a preparation for escape and can be pretty heavily prosecuted. Do not try to shoot again. There are patrols and cameras all over here.

We got in the car. Elderly cab driver turned his head to Shaposhnikov and asked him: ”So, sonny, you did your time? Congratulations. I have a bag in the back sit. There is some food there. Help yourself.”

by Valery Panyushkin

Kommersant, 11.2.2005

BBC News: Jailed tycoon rallies supporters

2005-11-03T22:42:00.000Z

Jailed Russian billionaire businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky has issued a rallying cry to supporters to create a new political elite of "honest heroes".
In a full-page advertisement in the UK's Financial Times newspaper, he describes the current Russian authorities as a criminal bureaucracy.

He accuses them of trying to isolate and physically destroy him, but warns that the fight is just beginning.

It is unclear how he issued the statement from his Siberian jail.

The former head of Russian oil giant Yukos is serving an eight-year prison sentence in a penal colony for economic crimes. The tycoon, once Russia's richest man, was convicted of tax evasion and fraud.

The colony in Krasnokamensk, in the eastern Chita region close to the Chinese border, is about 4,700km (3,000 miles) east of Moscow.

Critics accuse him of ripping off his homeland's natural wealth for personal gain. His supporters say the case against him was politically motivated and he is paying the price for his political ambitions and links to opponents of President Vladimir Putin.

In the advertisement, Khodorkovsky says the Kremlin has tried to isolate him from his "country and its people" and "to physically destroy him".

"By doing so, today's Russian government has proven once again that it's not ready for an open and honest discussion with me (or for any straight talk with the opposition," he says.

"They hope Khodorkovsky will be forgotten."

New path

In his appeal to his supporters, he says Russia faces enormous challenges, needing to rebuild the army and legal system.

"Create from scratch a new breed of officials - those interested in the fate of the country and its people, not their own unbridled personal enrichment," he instructs them.

"We need to step off the dead-end path to making Russia a simple source of raw materials, to make the decisive turn in the direction of a new knowledge-based economy."

The BBC's Stephen Eke says that although the specific policy ideas the advertisement contains are not different from the liberal agenda Khodorkovsky espoused before he was sent to jail, the language is.

Our correspondent says this suggests the advertisement comes from the lips of his allies Leonid Nevzlin, Vladimir Dubov and Mikhail Brudno - all, like Khodorkovsky, Jewish, current or former billionaires, and one-time oligarchs but now in self-imposed exile in Israel.

No sympathy

Earlier this week, they held a press conference to warn of what they said was a plot to "physically eliminate" Khodorkovsky.

They also accused President Vladimir Putin of personal enrichment at the expense of society.

Our correspondent says many ordinary Russians, who tend to view the oligarchs as the robber-barons of Russian capitalism, would find that hypocritical.

The latest available poll suggested that two-thirds of Russians had absolutely no sympathy for Khodorkovsky, and four-fifths were uninterested, or totally uninterested, in what he had to say.

BBC, 10.2.2005
_________
Strange commentary from the BBC. This text was already published in Russian some days ago, when Mikhail's lawyers came back from Krasnokamensk. Nevzlin & partner only translated it and published in foreign newspaper.

RADIO FREE EUROPE : Khodorkovskii Lawyer Says Russia 'Rebuilding The Gulag'

2005-11-03T22:35:00.000Z

On 16 October, Mikhail Khodorkovskii -- once Russia's richest man -- was interred at the Krasnokamensk penal colony, an isolated wasteland some 6,000 kilometers from Moscow. It was the latest, and most dramatic, move in the two-year ordeal of the former Yukos chief. But has the world heard the last of Khodorkovskii? One of his lawyers, Canadian Robert Amsterdam, says no. He spoke to RFE/RL today.

RFE/RL: Firstly, what can you tell us about Khodorkovskii's condition? It's now been more than two weeks since Khodorkovskii was taken to the Krasnokamensk penal colony. We know his wife Inna and some of his lawyers were able to see him last week. What did they have to say about Khodorkovskii's state of mind, and about the physical conditions at the prison?

Robert Amsterdam: I've spoken to the family. I can tell you that he's lost a tremendous amount of weight. I think it's very clear that all of us are shocked that the Russian Federation has been so transparent as to demonstrate to the world the resuscitation of the gulag. Vladimir Putin, who will be leading the G-8, is rebuilding the gulag. We really in the West need to understand the message that Mr. Putin is sending us. It isn't just that he wants to steal the oil and then send it to us, it is that he is prepared to be grotesquely obvious in his willingness to subvert democracy and to attack those who are viewed as even a possible source of opposition to him.

RFE/RL: Krasnokamensk is the site of a uranium-processing facility, and environmental and health standards are considered extremely low in the region. One human rights group put the average lifespan in the area at 42 years. Are you concerned about Khodorkovskii's ability to withstand the conditions of the prison for the next six years?

Amsterdam: Clearly, it is the intent of the Kremlin to continue to destroy his health in this sentence. The entire area is considered to be environmentally unsafe. We intend to bring this before every possible authority. His being placed there violates internal Russian law, it violates Article 3 of the European Convention, and it violates morality. So we intend to take steps to deal with it. But I certainly am not going to telegraph in advance any steps we may take to the Russians.

RFE/RL: As we know, Khodorkovskii is located over 6,000 kilometers away from Moscow; it takes a six-hour flight and a seven-hour drive to reach him. With this distance, it seems extremely difficult for him to maintain contact with his lawyers, and to maintain public awareness of his case. What are Khodorkovskii's visitation rights? Does he have access to any other form of communication?

Amsterdam: There's a difference between what he's allowed under the law and what he will be given. So if I tell you what the legal availability is, that isn't in any way reflective of what will happen to him. He is allowed a phone call frequently, but that hasn't been experienced yet. So we have to look at the track record before we can, in fairness, comment. I certainly want to avoid commenting about his prison or his prison authorities. I think that would be dangerous for him.

RFE/RL: Last week Khodorkovskii communicated for the first time from Krasnokamensk, through a very defiant, resolute statement posted on his website. Now, in the 2 November edition of the "Financial Times," there is a full-page ad from Khodorkovskii's associates, including Leonid Nevzlin, the majority shareholder of Menatep, which in turn holds a majority share in Yukos. The ad accuses the Kremlin of trying to "physically destroy" him and calling on supporters to help create a new political elite in Russia. Who is this advertisement meant to target? What kind of reaction are you hoping for from the West?

Amsterdam: This is not an ad taken out by Mr. Khodorkovskii. This is an ad taken out by friends of his, such as Mr. Nevzlin, who does not reside in the Russian Federation. I am sure that watching his close friend go through what he has has been extraordinarily painful for Mr. Nevzlin and for his colleagues who are now in Israel. I would gather that placing this ad is an attempt by them to demonstrate to the world that as long as they are living and breathing, Mr. Khodorkovskii will not be forgotten. Because I am sure that it is their great fear, as it is mine, that the moment the attention of the West turns away from him, something even more dramatic than being put into an environmentally unhealthy area will happen.

RFE/RL: All of these traumatic events have forced Khodorkovskii's associates and friends to adopt a kind of clan logic, supporting each other no matter what happens. We know that Berezovskii adopted the same approach. The Kremlin does the same. Do you feel that Russian politics or the Russian state is forcing Khodorkovskii's group to adopt this kind of clan logic?

Amsterdam: I don't think that's the case. In fact, to be fair, I think that's frankly very much not the case. I think Mr. Nevzlin and his folks have a very independent view, as is their right. I think Khodorkovskii's people are quite independent. But we have to be very careful in our mindset not to be too black-and-white about certain issues. Because there are people in the presidential administration who are aghast at what has happened to Khodorkovskii and Lebedev, and who recognize this is a violation of fundamental principles, and who want to make things right."

RFE/RL: Lawyers for Khodorkovskii's associate, Platon Lebedev, say they will appeal his six-year sentence at the Kharp high-security prison colony, in the Polar Urals. Is there a similar appeal under way for Khodorkovskii?

Amsterdam: I will not make that announcement here. It will be made at the appropriate time.

RFE/RL: Last week, while Russian Industry and Energy Minister Viktor Khristenko was in the United States, he was served a subpoena to appear in a U.S. court in connection with a lawsuit filed by minority shareholders of Yukos who say they collectively lost $3 million after the de facto renationalization of the oil giant. On the face of it, the lawsuit is potentially quite serious -- it targets the Russian government, four state-owned energy companies, and a number of government officials. But Khristenko, for one, doesn't seem to be taking it particularly seriously, and has suggested the case should be tried by a Russian court, and that it's Yukos that should be sued, not the government. How is this lawsuit likely to develop?

Amsterdam: What I can tell you is that Mr. Khristenko and others who have been involved in Yukos had better take the case seriously, because they will ultimately pay the price. And whether it's this year, it's next year, or it's 10 years, when you engage in criminal conduct, and when you steal assets, you can never make it right. And I have every belief there will be a day of reckoning for all of these officials who engaged in this theft, for all of these officials who have illegally imprisoned Khodorkovskii and Lebedev. They will all meet the ends they deserve.

RFE/RL: Russia is arguing that the United States has no jurisdiction in the shareholders' lawsuit because Yukos is a Russian company. Is this a viable argument?

Amsterdam: No, it's not. I'm not talking specifically about this case; I'm speaking generally. What the Russians are attempting to do in this case is pretend we're 50 years behind the times. We are in a new era of international law, we are in a new era of international human rights. They have signed the agreements; they need to read them.

RADIO FREE EUROPE

Mosnews : Yukos Shareholder Nevzlin Says Kremlin Intends to Kill Khodorkovsky

2005-11-01T22:38:00.000Z

One of the owners of Yukos oil company’s main shareholder, Menatep Group, Leonid Nevzlin, said on Tuesday the Russian authorities intended to kill the jailed former Yukos head Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Menatep head Platon Lebedev.

During a news conference broadcast online, Nevzlin said the intention to kill Khodorkovsky and Lebedev, of which Khodorkovsky had written in a letter sent from custody, was confirmed by the fact that they were sent so far to remote prison colonies. He also reminded his audience that Khodorkovsky had attempted to register as a candidate for parliament, but failed due to the rapid consideration of his appeal and the sentence that sent him to eight years in prison.

Another well-known convict, retired commando Vladimir Kvachkov, suspected of the attempted murder of the Russian energy chief Anatoly Chubais, was able to register as candidate, Nevzlin pointed out. Nevzlin called the case against Khodorkovsky and Lebedev politically motivated.

Another Menatep owner, Vladimir Brudno, said the case against Yukos’ tax debts had been forged by the Russian authorities to buy its main subsidiary, Yuganskneftefaz. He added that the same means had been used by the Russian authorities when buying Sibneft oil company.

Nevzlin was asked whether he would support former Russian PM Mikhail Kasyanov as the opposition candidate for president, to which he replied that Kasyanov had disappeared from Russian political life without having commented on the deal between state-owned gas monopoly Gazprom and Sibneft. This caused doubt over Kasyanov’s political independence. The deal proved to be a collusion between the acting and the former Russian regime aimed at personal enrichment, he said.

Nevzlin said there had never been such a level of corruption in Russia before. He also spoke about the pressure on the media in Russia. He added that the Reporters Without Borders had put Russia at 138th position among 167 countries in the freedom of press rating. Nevzlin asked how Russia would chair the G8 next year with such figures.

The shareholders plan to continue explaining to the international community what is going on in Russian business including the deal with Sibneft, Nevzlin said.

Nevzlin, Brudno and the third Menatep owner Vladimir Dubov are currently in Israel. They have been placed on the Russian wanted list for various charges including fraud.

In Mosnews, 10.1.2005

Novosti : Khodorkovsky resigns from business union

2005-10-31T22:52:00.000Z

MOSCOW, October 31 (RIA Novosti) - Former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky, now serving an eight-year prison term for fraud and tax evasion, announced his resignation from the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs Monday, putting an end to speculation that he might be expelled in spring.

"Today, I am asking to be relieved of my duties as a member of the governing bureau of the RSPP," Khodorkovsky said in a statement posted on his press center's Web site.

He thanked the members of the bureau for supporting and not expelling him despite his arrest.

"I cannot remain in the governing bodies of this highly respected union for two reasons: I am no longer an industrialist or entrepreneur and I do not intend to run any profit-making businesses," he said in his statement. "From now on, I will only engage in public and political activities. Due to certain well-known circumstances, I will not be able to assist the RSPP in its work in organizational or financial terms."

Novosti, 10.31.2005

The Times : Sent to Siberia: the oligarch who had it all - and lost it

2005-10-31T20:29:00.000Z

By Jeremy Page
An imprisoned oligarch will not allow his spirit to be broken by jail, reports our correspondent

One man is a former Soviet dissident who spent four years in the gulags and fifteen working as a bus driver before becoming an Orthodox priest. The other is a former Communist youth activist who became the richest man in post-Soviet Russia before he fell foul of the Kremlin and was thrown in jail.

Father Sergei Taratukhin, 49, and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, 42, trod very different paths through the death throes of the Soviet Union and the birth of a new Russian state. But yesterday these two victims of Russia’s turbulent politics came face to face in the unlikely setting of the YaG-14/10 penal colony in Krasnokamensk, a uranium mining town in eastern Siberia.

Father Sergei, the prison’s priest, met Khodorkovsky, its newest inmate, for the first time since he was transferred from Moscow on October 15 to serve out his sentence. As the two men talked for 20 minutes, an instant bond was formed between the priest imprisoned for challenging the Kremlin in 1974 and the oil tycoon jailed for the same in President Putin’s Russia.

“When I was in the prison camp, the KGB men used to say they dreamt of a day when political prisoners would be treated like ordinary criminals,” Father Sergei told The Times. “Now their dream has come true.”

His was a lone sympathetic voice in Krasnokamensk, a town of 65,000 people built in the 1960s near the Russian border with China and Mongolia. This dusty settlement of wooden cottages and concrete high-rises was a closed military town in Soviet times, and most residents despise the oligarchs who profited from the Union’s collapse.

Khodorkovsky accused the Kremlin this week of trying to break his spirit by sending him here rather than to a prison near his home in Moscow or the court where he was convicted, as is the norm. “The Kremlin has tried to isolate me completely from the country and the people, and, what is more, they have tried to destroy me physically,” he said in a statement.

“They hope that Khodorkovsky will soon be forgotten,” he said. “They are trying to convince you, friends, that the fight is over. That you must resign yourselves to domination by a self-serving bureaucracy in Russia. This is not true. The fight is only just beginning.”

Earlier, he sarcastically thanked Russian authorities for sending him to a region where political prisoners have been exiled for almost 200 years. This was where Tsar Nicholas I sent the Decembrists — a group of reformist aristocrats — after they attempted to stage an uprising in 1825.

In Soviet times, dissidents were also exiled here. Now it is home to Russia’s most prominent critic — the founder of the Yukos oil company, who once topped the Russian rich list with an estimated fortune of $15.2 billion (£8.5 billion).

Inna, his wife, made a point of visiting a church built by the Decembrists in Chita, the regional capital, as she made her way to see her husband this week. “In 180 years, the behaviour of the State has not changed much,” she said.

But Krasnokamensk was not chosen only for its symbolic value. Its location — six hours’ flight plus nine hours’ drive from Moscow — makes it all the harder for Khodorkovsky’s lawyers and relatives to contact him.

The town is also a minefield of health hazards, according to his legal team. Winter temperatures drop to -40C and the prison, like most in Russia, is riddled with tuberculosis. The illness has been diagnosed in five people in YaG-14/10 this year alone. Two inmates have died since January, Nikolai Podprigorin, the head doctor at Krasnokamensk’s state sanitary control centre, said. One died from gangrene, the other from dysentery after sewage leaked into the prison water supply.

Officials say that conditions in the prison are no worse than elsewhere in the country. But Khodorkovsky’s lawyers have an added concern about radioactive contamination from the Priargunskoye uranium mine, 10 miles (16km) away.

In 1991 the authorities found radiation levels of up to 7,000 becquerels per cubic metre — more than 30 times the safety limit — in parts of the village of Oktyabrskaya, next to the mine. They started to evacuate its 3,000 residents, but 2,000 are still there because the local government lacks the funds to move them.

Vika Kuznetsova, 26, who runs the village shop, said: “It seriously affects my health. Our children are very sick. They tell us everything is OK now but no one believes them.”

Dr Podprigorin said that there were pockets of high radioactivity where residents had used materials from the mines to build dachas and roads. But he insisted that radiation levels in the town centre and around the prison were normal. Either way, Krasnokamensk is a rude shock for a man who has spent most of the past decade living in a luxurious villa in Moscow and being ferried around in a limousine or private jet.

All that ended when he was arrested by special forces two years ago and charged with tax evasion and fraud. Khodorkovsky protested that the charges were trumped up by the Kremlin to penalise him for challenging its energy policy and funding opposition parties.

But his company was forcibly renationalised in December and he was sentenced to eight years in prison in May after a trial that was widely seen as a sham. With two years already served, Khodorkovsky faces another six in Krasnokamensk.

His new home is a bunk bed in one of 13 barrack-like buildings housing 100-120 prisoners each. His Italian suits have been swapped for dark blue prison fatigues, with a label on his chest saying “Khodorkovsky MB”.

Yuri Yakushevsky, a spokesman for the prison service, said: “Mikhail Khodorkovsky does all this work on an equal basis with the others.” There are, however, ways to avoid unsavoury chores. Vyacheslav Chumakov, 34, who spent seven years in the prison, said that Khodorkovsky would be treated with deference by inmates and warders. “A strong person will be able to live well in prison, while a weak one will not,” Mr Chumakov said.

The former oil tycoon is likely to live like the polozhentsi — prominent criminal figures — who have other prisoners cook and run errands for them, Vladimir Lebedev, 22, another former inmate, said. “Money can buy you anything on the inside,” he added.

Anything, that is, except good company. Prisoners are allowed four long visits of three days each and six short ones of three hours every year. For the long visits, the prison authorities provide a room with two beds for the inmate and his visitor.

Inna Khodorkovskaya emerged from the prison yesterday after her first three-day visit. She and her husband’s parents, Marina and Boris, are contemplating moving to the region. His lawyers are thinking about setting up a base here to co-ordinate his appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.

But his most regular companion is likely to be Father Sergei, who visits the prison every Friday. He is well qualified to counsel Khodorkovsky. At the age of 18 he was charged with organising an anti-Soviet youth group and sentenced to four years in a labour camp in the Perm region, thousands of miles from his home in Chita.

His fellow inmates included Ukrainian and Armenian nationalists, and people who had tried to defect. He shared a cell for two years with Sergei Kovalyov, the dissident and human rights activist.

By day, they were forced to mend electrical appliances. By night, they would discuss politics in hushed tones, or read books from the well-stocked but carefully censored prison library. And they regularly staged hunger and labour strikes to protest against their detention. By contrast, the biggest problem Khodorkovsky will face is boredom, Father Sergei said. Some inmates have jobs, making uniforms, wooden furniture and souvenirs, but there is not enough work to go round.

Nataliya Terikhova, a lawyer, said that Khodorkovsky had asked for 50 newspapers and magazines. He plans to study for a doctorate and is considering teaching in a school attached to the prison, according to another lawyer.

Whatever he does, Father Sergei said, his time in prison is certain to change him, but not necessarily as the Kremlin would like. “No one came out of my prison a Communist,” he said.

Despite the KGB’s watchful eye, Father Sergei converted to Christianity while in prison. He said that Khodorkovsky was also now a believer, although he had never been baptised. “The last two years have taught him patience and humility,” he said. “God has set him a difficult test, but I am sure he is strong enough to pass it.”

Roll-calls, chores and porridge — one day in the life of a prisoner

6am Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s day begins with a wake-up call over loudspeakers

6.30 Breakfast of porridge and black tea in the communal canteen

7.00 Roll-call outside, which can last up to two hours, even in winter

9.00 Inmates on duty do chores including cleaning, bread-baking, washing-up and mending of equipment. Weekly dormitory checks by prison staff

11.00 Cooking lunch

Noon Lunch of meat, bread, potatoes and black tea. Prison spends 35.91 roubles (70p) per inmate per day on meals

1pm Second roll-call outside. Former inmates say that feet get numb standing on the concrete prison ground

3.00 Work and/or study. Options include welding, sewing, carpentry and farmwork. Inmates can earn up to 23.23 roubles (46p) a day but can only keep 50 per cent of their salary.

Practice for occasional musical and other shows, especially to mark national holidays

4.00 Spare time. Shopping for soap, cigarettes and other basics at prison store. Optional prayers and private meetings with Father Sergei every Friday. Newspapers arrive by post, about three days after issue. Washing by rota in communal bathrooms

5.00 Cooking dinner

6.00 Dinner of meat, bread, potatoes and black tea. Occasional vegetables, chicken or even seafood when inspectors come from Moscow

7.00 Washing up, cleaning

8.00 Television — one in each of the 13 dormitory blocks, two hours maximum. Only four channels available, three of them state controlled

10.00 Lights out

MARCHED OFF TO THE GULAGS

There are 763,054 men, women and children in prison in Russia. This is more than 500 prisoners per 100,000 people

Britain has 142 prisoners per 100,000 people and in Eastern European countries the average is 184 per 100,000

Amnesty International estimates that more than half of Russian prisoners have health problems

One in ten prisoners has tuberculosis and about one in 20 has HIV or Aids

Under Stalin the population of forced labour camps — gulags — peaked at 1.7 million in 1939

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, an inmate, won the Nobel Prize for Literature for works including The Gulag Archipelago

Since 1996 the number of prisoners has shrunk by about 300,000

The Times, 10.31.2005

The Guardian : Welcome to penal colony YaG 14/10. Now the home of one of Russia's richest men

2005-10-25T16:43:00.000+01:00

Billionaire gets six years in Siberia Border region

Tom Parfitt in Krasnokamensk
Tuesday October 25, 2005
The Guardian

Three thousand one hundred miles from Moscow, the rough stone track crests a rise and all is revealed. Hunched on the open steppe stands a group of tatty grey buildings, swept by plumes of dust. Welcome to Krasnokamensk, a town at the edge of civilisation.
Nearly two centuries have passed since Tsar Nikolai I banished the rebellious aristocrats known as the Decembrists to remote corners of eastern Siberia. In Soviet times, enemies of the people were dispatched to similar benighted spots in the network of labour camps called the gulag.

Today, in Vladimir Putin's Russia, the price of dissent comes no cheaper. For Mikhail Khodorkovsky - former billionaire, oil tycoon and convicted criminal - the road to internal exile ended here in Krasnokamensk. After speculation about where he would serve his term, prison officials confirmed last week that Khodorkovsky had been delivered to this outpost to complete his term on charges of fraud and tax evasion. On the edge of this wind-blasted company town near the Chinese border - it was built to serve a giant uranium mine nearby - stands penal colony YaG 14/10, the place that will be his home for up to six years.

Bitter winds

In winter, temperatures drop to -40C (-40F) and bitter winds sweep across the steppe. Visitors are rare and the tycoon's arrival has sent a ripple of disruption through the town of 60,000, once off limits to all outsiders. "He's the biggest bird that ever flew in here," admits a guard at the camp.

Once Russia's richest man with a personal fortune of $15bn, Khodorkovsky ran afoul of the Kremlin when he lobbied for private oil pipelines and dripped cash into parties opposed to Mr Putin. He was arrested two years ago and convicted in May after proceedings widely condemned as a farce.

This morning the 42-year-old father of three, who previously lived in a villa in Moscow and was driven to work in an armoured saloon, wakes up in barracks No 8 of YaG 14/10. Dressed in blue fatigues, he will shuffle off with his fellow zeks (slang for inmates) to a breakfast of porridge and black tea.

Yuri Yakushevksy, Siberia spokesman for the federal penitentiary service, told Interfax the colony spent 65.44 roubles daily (£1.29) on each prisoner, of which 35 were spent on food. "All the prisoners eat in the same canteen," he said. "They prepare the food themselves and they do the washing up. The bread is baked by the prisoners. On the menu today is porridge, bread, meat. Soon they will get a wagon of seafood and fish."

He said inmates rose at 6am, and those on duty worked for two hours, while all could watch TV for two hours a day. "Khodorkovsky is no exception and works like all the others," he said, adding that he had brought in two cases of books and was studying for an unspecified doctorate. He would sleep on a bunkbed in a dormitory 40 metres by 15 metres, in a two-floor building holding an estimated 160 prisoners.

Old habits die hard in these parts, and even approaching the prison - known to locals as "the zone" - prompts a warning to retreat quickly. A ramshackle collection of huts behind a wall held up by slumped concrete pillars, about a mile outside the town, is all one can glimpse before guards bear down. An observation post provides a clear field of fire over the road and surrounding wasteland.

Jumpy

Guards are already jumpy: three local reporters were arrested and their cameras confiscated for getting too close at the weekend. Outside yesterday, men in camouflage erected a checkpoint to stop prying eyes. But details of life inside soon leak out.

"There's only a few old hands left over from the days when it was a harsh regime camp," says one prison source. "Khodorkovsky's got nothing to worry about - they're mostly fraudsters and thieves, just like him."

Work offers one desirable perk: a salary of up to 23.23 roubles (46p) a day. Inmates are largely in their mid-20s and are keen for a job to alleviate boredom and earn money for cigarettes and chocolate, bought in the prison shop.

"There's a kind of sewing workshop where they make uniforms for policemen and some of them get to look after cows and pigs," says Valery Dereshov, a local reporter who went inside two years ago. Natalia Terekhova, a local lawyer who visited Khodorkovsky on Friday, says he was calm but disoriented. "Mikhail Borisovich had a lot of questions about the conditions, his rights, his access to newspapers and television," she says. "Imagine an intellectual person finding himself for the first time in such a place. He does not want to lose touch with the outside world."

Isolation

Khodorkovsky's legal team in Moscow is less restrained. Anton Drel, his defence lawyer, accuses the Kremlin of isolating the tycoon from his family. "This is the pursuit of a certain goal: it's vengeance," he says, adding that he is preparing a complaint to the European court of human rights on grounds that prisoners are habitually allowed to serve their sentences close to home. Khodorkovsky's mother, Marina, has said she and his wife, Inna, may take turns living nearby.

In Krasnokamensk, sympathy for Khodorkovsky is thin on the ground. "We survive here and so will he," says Gennady, 58, a geologist fixing his car in nearby Oktyabrsky village, where tests a decade ago found radon levels at 190 times their recommended maximum.

Irina, a chemist at the uranium plant, says: "He's an oligarch after all. If his relatives want to come and visit they can use his private jet."

The Guardian, 10.25.2005
___________

Sorry Irina, but you should know that unlike Putin'friend Abramovich, Khodorkovsky has no private jet and never had. Two years ago he was arrested on board of an old Tupolev 134 plane that his compagny used to hire for its staff.

Kommersant: "There is human inside of him"

2005-10-25T16:37:00.000+01:00

How Mikhail Khodorkovsky was met in the correctional facility

Doing the Time

The quarantine for inmate Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who is doing his time in the correctional labor facility YG 14/10 (town of Krasnokamensk, Chita Region) is over. The inmates, who are ranked as “criminal authorities” in prison, characterized the former oligarch as a “man” –one who is supposed to work. However, there is no work at the correctional facility. “The guys are thinking that there is something human inside of him,” the criminal authorities inside of the correctional facility told Kommersant correspondent Sergey Dyupin about Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

The punishment by the transfer

People in Krasnokamensk started to suspect that soon some kind of VIP-inmate would arrive at YG 14/10. However nobody, including the staff of the correctional facility, knew who and when the person was supposed to arrive. “Sometime in the beginning of September we started to see high ranking people from Chita, Novosibirsk and Moscow,” I’ve been told in local hotel “Central,” by the way the only hotel in town that provides soap and toilet paper in the rooms. “All these people had ranks not lower than a colonel and were flashing IDs from different law-enforcement organizations – Prosecution, Ministry of Justice, FSB. Because all our tenants were going into the correctional facility, we realized that there are some changes coming.” I learned in the correctional facility why the colonels were coming to Krasnokamensk. “We had a severe check up for a whole month,” one of the officers from YG 14/10 told me. “The inspection was working at several directions simultaneously. They were reading everybody files. They looked at all engineering installations. They were happy with the results and told us that we should wait for a ‘guest.’ On the question who is ‘the guest,’ one of the inspectors right before the departure said: Lebedev. After that the whole facility, as well as whole city, started to wait for Platon Lebedev’s arrival.” As the officer explained, the “sincerity” of the General was nothing more than a tactical trick. The officers from the Federal Penitentiary Service (FPS) were putting intentional clouds so nobody could make malicious plans against Khodorkovsky and Lebedev during their transfer. For the same reason the guarding of the inmates during the transfer was not entrusted to the regional changing convoys. From the gates of the Matrosskaya Tishina Prison and all way to the gates of YG 14/10 in Krasnokamensk, Khodorkovsky was guarded by the Special Convoy of FPS. It is still unclear how the former head of the YUKOS was transported. According to the official version from the leadership of FPS, the former oligarch had no different treatment than other convicts. In other words, together with other inmates he was loaded into the special prison railroad cart and went to the East – across whole wide country with the usual stop in Vladimir, Yekaterinburg and other prison transportation hubs. In these hubs the convicts are sorted by groups, which are being sent to different locations. Allegedly, the last hub for Khodorkovsky was Chita.

On the Manchurian Railroad Branch, which goes from Chita to China, there is only one prison railroad car. “The car is always attached right behind the locomotive,” one of the officers, who guards this railroad branch, explained to me. “The car is always attached to the passenger train #601 and #602 Chita-Priargunsk and all the inmates to the Krasnokamensk correctional labor facility travel in this car. Train #601 comes everyday but the prisoners are being delivered only four times per months. On October 18, the train came to Krasnokamensk without the special railroad car. We were unloading the prison car a day before and Khodorkovsky wasn’t there. Theoretically, he could be brought with the special convoy of three officers in the regular passenger train, but we hadn’t had such convoys already for a long time.” According to the FPS on the last stage of the trip, the Federal Agents decided to trick alleged malicious enemies of Khodorkovsky and delivered the former oligarch from Chita by a car. If this was the true, then Khodorkovsky was already severely punished - even before he started to do his time in the correctional facility. I rode the same route on the passenger seat of old Toyota, which I hired in Chita. There is no solid asphalt in these 600 kilometers. Every 20 meters or so there are big holes in the pavement with sand in the bottom. If car goes with a good speed – and you have to drive fast if you want to get there before the dark- the wheels regularly hit these holes and the suspension jars the passenger pretty severely. As a result, after the first 100 km the passenger feels like he was blinded, dumbfounded and dragged on a washboard. After 300 km the passenger doesn’t care anymore about the environment and by the end of the trip a person is totally zombified. During one of these stops, in the cloud of dust created by the holes, I heard a song.

When the dust settled down I saw a man sitting next to his car with a tape recorder. He asked us, “Going to Khodorkovsky?” after he found out that we got lost. He offered us to come out from the car and pointed somewhere to the west. Looking in the direction of his hand, we started to look on the hills lit by the last rays of the sun and suddenly we say a miracle. From behind one of the hills we saw a huge letter Y then letter K started to come out and soon enough the whole word YUKOS appeared on the horizon and disappeared again. Then between two other hills we saw a train a diesel and each rail car had a huge word YUKOS written on the side. Go after the train and you won’t get lost said the man with the tape recorder.

Behind the five fences

We couldn’t find out about the fate of the famous inmate at YG 14-10. They did not let me further than the entrance, saying it is Sunday and the commander of the correctional facility is off and nobody except him can let the media into the perimeter. However, they could not prohibit us from walking around the labor facility with the cameraman. At the same time, they recommended not approaching closer than 25 meters because “it agitates the guards of the perimeter.” This was enough to find out that inmate Khodorkovsky is guarded quite well. Today he is separated from the outside world by at least five fences: from regular barbed wire, concertina barbed wire, and meshed barbed wire. Besides on the top of the cement fence there are wires with 380 volt electricity running through them. Between these fences there is also control sand strip to track the steps of escapes and huge Caucus shepherd dogs running lose. The dog house is located every 50 meters and of course in the corners of the perimeters there are watch towers with armed guards. As the knowledgeable people insist, the soldiers without any warning give a shot in the air when somebody approaches the perimeter from outside and tries to throw something over the fences. There were also rumors that in some cases some visitors were leaving for home in jeeps with hoods and tailgates riddled by bullets. And these visitors don’t ever have the chance to send some packages bypassing the officers of the correctional facility. We had a chance to find out ourselves the effectiveness of the guards. While we were walking around the perimeter, nobody was bothering us. However, as soon as our cameraman pulled out the camera and tried to make a shot, we heard the distinctive sound of the gun lock and short command, “Stop!” Several minutes after, we were quite politely delivered by a convoy of three soldiers with assault rifles to the gate office of the correctional facility. Soon, a Krasnokamensk police patrol arrived after a call made by the guards. The police patrol took us into the precinct, checked out documents and released us after finding out that there was no crime in our actions. We did not try to penetrate the perimeter. We were just trying to make pictures and there is no law that says we cannot do so from outside. We thanked the law enforcement officers after they drove us to the center of the town.

The wood processing and sewing facilities are closed and the pig sty is on its last leg

I was told about Khodorkovsky’s first days of imprisonment at YG 14/10 by Natalya Terekhova, head of the Krasnokamensk office of Chita’s attorney’s board. According to her, she visited Khodorkovsky last Wednesday and Thursday and provided a consultation. She did not receive any complaints from the client. “When lawyer or doctor are coming to visit a person at the correctional facility, the first question they ask is whether there is anything that bothers you,” the attorney said. “I did the same. Both time Khodorkovsky said he did not have any problems. It looked to me like he was in a normal physical and spiritual mood.” According to Terekhova asked to see a lawyer only to let know about his location to people in Moscow and to find out about the rules of the correctional facility. “Khodorkovsky as an educated person was interested, for instance, how often he can receive newspapers and magazines and what quantity. We agreed he will not have a problem with that. He already received a catalog and he is selecting the media that he would like to subscribe to. So far, he picked up about 100 names of the publications,” the lawyer said. Besides, the attorney also pointed out that Khodorkovsky was also interested in the financial side of his life in the correctional facility—how often and how much he can use his money. They did not discuss a possible job that the formal oligarch will be doing. In the meantime, Khodorkovsky most likely will have problems with employment. The problem is that labor in YG 14/10 correctional facility is not forced, but rather a hard-earned right of few inmates and people who live on probation outside of the perimeter. The inmates get to work only for good behavior. Although the money is very small, most of the inmates except the professional criminals who consider work as a shame, are really willing to work. Otherwise, they would die here from boredom.

“Of course they pay almost nothing,” a former prisoner of 14/10 told me. “By the end of the term after all the deductions, it was about 1500. But it was still enough to treat local kids who meet all inmates leaving the gates of the prison. But now everybody is walking out from 14/10 almost naked. They don’t even have enough money to buy a railroad ticket to Chita. And these poor guys are going to the railway station to beg for a free ride. And of course nobody gives it to them. The municipal authorities are usually spending their own money just to remove these people from the town and buy them a ticket.”

The problem is that inmates from 14/10 do not work in the town’s workplaces anymore. They never worked in the uranium mining plant and management of the neighboring cement plant prefers recently to use labor of prisoners on probation because there is a bunch of them around here and they work hard for the money. The small industry that once was blooming inside the correctional facility is closed. For instance, the wood processing shop is shut down, the big and small pig sties are on their last leg. There is not much left from the loading and unloading dock of the metal yard—three rusted cranes. Sometimes inmates climb on top of them just to take a look at Krasnokamensk, which his located only two kilometers away, before the guards will order them down. Until recently there was a sewing shop, but it was closed also. The three-story building of the former sewing shop is now being remodeled into isolation facilities. However, this renovation is done by free construction workers. The labor loving inmates can only clean after the construction workers and sweep the yard.

“Khodorkovsky is OK in there”

The most complete information about the famous inmate I was able to receive from the criminal “authorities” who are supervising YG 14/10. These two men who for understandable reasons asked not to be named and for the precise details of their prison supervision revealed, persuaded me that “Khodorkovsky is OK in there.” At least so far, they said. “Together with him there were about 20 people in the quarantine,” the “authorities” explained. “As far as we know, after the check for the snitches, all from this quarantine would go prison as the “men” and not the “authorities.” This oligarch is OK so far. The main thing in prison is to maintain the dignity and everything else would be good.”

Because, these two men from the criminal “authorities” did not watch closely the “men” quarantine, they agreed to help me and made a telephone call to the “authorities” right in the correctional labor facility 14/10. They could not connect with the top guy but quickly got the hold of his deputy. “What’s up, brother. I wanted to inquire about Khodorkovsky. Do you know about him?” one of my “authorities” asked, after the ritual of special prison greetings. “Everything is OK with him. The guys were saying that he talked with people normally and was cool. The guys think that he has something human inside of him. But this is just preliminary conclusion. When he starts to live in jail, than we’ll see what is going to happen.”

by Sergey Dyupin

Kommersant, 10.24.2005