About Platon Lebedev
Platon Lebedev, born on November 29, 1956, is married and has four children. Prior to his arrest on July 2, 2003, Platon Lebedev was director of Group MENATEP, a diversified holding company with assets in oil and gas, mineral fertilizers, telecommunications and information technologies, banking and financial services. Group MENATEP was the majority shareholder of the Yukos Oil Company.
Platon Lebedev's arrest was widely perceived to have been a warning to Mikhail Khodorkovsky, as well as a first step towards the expropriation of the gem of Russia's oil and gas industry. Lebedev's arrest and detention were replete with violations of the most basic human rights. Given that he was arrested in his hospital bed, denied independent medical care during his trial, and sentenced to a work camp in Russia's inhospitable Arctic Circle despite his chronic health conditions, Lebedev's case has attracted international concern.
Personal & Business History
Lebedev was one of the founders of Bank MENATEP, acting as President of the Bank between 1991 and 1995. In 1996, he became Deputy Chairman of the Executive Committee of Yukos. Click here to read more.
In His Words
Platon Lebedev, with his characteristic wit, has frequently and fiercely rebutted the charges against him and Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Click here to read more.
From 1981 to 1989, Lebedev was Head of the Economic & Planning Department of V/O Zarubezhgeologia, the legal entity under the Ministry of Geology responsible for trade in geological resources. Lebedev graduated in 1981 from Russia's prestigious Plekhanov Academy of National Economy with a degree in Industrial Economics.
Lebedev was one of the founders of Bank MENATEP, acting as President of the Bank between 1991 and 1995. In 1996, he became Deputy Chairman of the Executive Committee of Yukos, and served as Deputy Chairman of its Executive Committee and President of Yukos Refining and Marketing from 1997 to 1999.
In his role at Yukos, Lebedev led efforts to introduce Yukos stock on international capital markets.
The Group MENATEP Advisory Board, convened by Lebedev, brought together high-level Western business and political leaders to assist in implementing international best practices and organizational policies reflecting high standards of corporate governance.
The Russian newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta wrote at the time that:
"Yukos is a company with management philosophy that is totally different from that of the old oil barons. It is the philosophy based on the studies of Western experience. And it practically does not trace its origins to the Soviet-type economy."
Platon Lebedev was born on November 29th, 1956. He is married and has four children.
Since his arrest, Platon Lebedev, a man of powerful intellect and conviction, has fiercely rebuked the charges against him: "The assertions and conclusions of the Prosecutor General's Office do not correspond to reality, are not based on law and contain libelous and deliberately false information," he said.
In response to the guilty verdict against him, Lebedev sought to reassure Russians about the long-term future of their country: "The root of the problem is the systematic crisis caused by degraded officials, not the country itself."
In December 2008, while answering questions from Novaya Gazeta readers about his trial and Russia's political system, Lebedev said he would not leave "a single stone standing" of these delirious charges. In pursuing an appeal against the second charge in December 2010, Lebedev stated:
"It is an unconditional legal fact that this "verdict" is knowingly unjust and has been issued in the absence of the event of the crime - of the so-called "theft of 347.6 million tons of oil. The knowingly unjust verdict (with the obvious absence of the event of the crime - "theft of oil"- itself) contains distortions unprecedented by their scale and brazen falsifications of provisions of international law and the RF Constitution, criminal law, provisions of the CCP, main economic laws, generally-accepted norms of corporate and financial law, elementary rules of arithmetic, basics of geography, and so on, and so forth."