About the Yukos Affair
Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky was arrested in October 2003 and sentenced in 2005 to an 8-year prison term. In February 2007, when the former Yukos Oil Company chief had become eligible for release on parole, new charges of embezzlement and money laundering were brought against him. The second trial based on that indictment began in March 2009. Khodorkovsky and his co-accused business partner Platon L. Lebedev pleaded not guilty, while emphasizing that the charges against them were incomprehensible and unexplained. After 20 months of grave procedural violations throughout the trial, on December 27, 2010, both Khodorkovsky and Lebedev were found guilty by Moscow's Khamovnichesky Court. On December 30, 2010, when less than a year remained before completion of their current prison terms, they were sentenced to an overall total of 14 years imprisonment, pushing their scheduled release from 2011 to 2017. The first stage of the appeal was filed on December 31 2010. Appeal proceedings are now set to unfold in early 2011, however it is impossible to estimate with certainty what the timetable of these proceedings will be.
The charges in this second trial were based on allegations that are incongruous with those of the first case against Khodorkovsky and Lebedev as well as the tax cases against Yukos. On one hand, the authorities imposed grossly punitive taxes on oil sold and accounted for by Yukos; on the other hand, the same oil produced by Yukos over a period of six years is alleged not to have been sold by Yukos but rather to have been embezzled by Khodorkovsky and Lebedev, with laundering of the proceeds.
The trial is widely seen as a failure of President Dmitry A. Medvedev's pledge to end "legal nihilism" in Russia. The guilty verdict sent a damaging message to the Russian people, investors, foreign governments and international tribunals that the country is not ready to change. The absurd outcome of this trial was resoundingly condemned by the international community, which saw the verdict as severely undercutting the country's prospects for modernisation.
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