The Procuracy and the Bully Pulpit
Throughout the endless hearings, trials, and years of the persecution campaign against Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev, we've become rather used to a number of common outrages. In the past, these prosecutors essentially attempted murder on Vasily Aleksanyan in order to obtain false testimony against the defendants, withholding medical treatment in a blackmail attempt. For years they kept Svetlana Bakhmina behind bars, despite being pregnant and the mother of two other children. Numerous others Yukos employees have been arrested, harassed, threatened, and intimidated - especially those who might appear in a court of law to dispute the state's case.
However yesterday's open bullying and harassment by the prosecutors of Stephen Wilson, a former tax director at PricewaterhouseCoopers, came as a shock even to the most indifferent observers of the trial, prompting the judge to intervene at one point.
When it came time for the prosecutors to cross-examine Wilson, they had few questions about the actual testimony, during which he asserted that the vertically integrated tax structure upheld by Yukos was in line with international rules and norms. Instead they grilled the British auditor, accusing him of personally underpaying his own taxes, and launching a series of allegations against him that he had helped Khodorkovsky evade taxes. Prosecutor Valery Lakhtin was repeatedly reprimanded by the judge for being out of order. Then, adding insult to injury, the procuracy attempted to serve Mr. Wilson with a subpoena minutes after he completed his testimony.
Keep in mind that this was the very first foreign witness allowed to testify in the trial, and the only UK citizen, but he was far from the first to declare before the court that the embezzlement that the defendants are accused of would have been impossible under the corporate structures upheld by the company. Even Gref and Khristenko had to admit that these crimes could not have occurred.
Speaking to reporters after the incident, Sanford Saunders, one of the defense lawyers, commented that this crass attack against Wilson represented "a clear effort to intimidate him and other future potential defense witnesses." As though it weren't already difficult enough to persuade witnesses to come and testify to the truth of what happened during the state's attack on Yukos - now such an action of honesty appears to have been criminalized.
So why do the prosecutors in this trial spend so much time discussing fantasy crimes instead of proving the charges they are meant to prove? What is it that these people might say before the judge that has made the procuracy so crazy with rage, and willing to resort back to the bully pulpit to prevent such words from being spoken? At the end of the day, it is difficult to tell why one witness should be so much more insulting than the next, but the spectacle of embarrassment hangs high above these bureaucrats.
There have been hopes in the recent past that this trial, unlike the first one, might be somewhat more fair and not quite as predetermined with the verdict, and as such the defense had to prepare carefully and withstand the continuing frustration of only partial access to their rights, their evidence, and their witnesses. But yesterday was a sign that the scales can still tip very far away from the illusion of impartiality, and the idea that the prosecution has to go so far as to use scare tactics and trumped up subpoenas to create a climate of terror against witnesses ... well, that just speaks for itself.
By James Kimer, Guest Commentator to the Khodorkovsky and Lebedev Communications Center