Other Key Individuals
Over 50 criminal cases have been filed against Yukos executives, employees, and owners in connection with the campaign against the company. In addition to the high-profile trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev, several other cases, in particular, have received a good deal of attention.
Svetlana Bakhmina
Svetlana Bakhmina was a mid-level lawyer for Yukos. In 2004 she replaced Dmitry Gololobov, the head of the Yukos legal department who left Russia in fear of criminal persecution. Bakhmina was arrested on December 7, 2004, on fraud charges. In April 2006 she was convicted and later sentenced to six and one-half years of imprisonment.
The case of Bakhmina, whose arrest was seen as an attempt to bring Gololobov back to Russia, was particularly disheartening because she is the mother of two little boys, who were aged 3 and 7 at the time of her arrest. At times during her imprisonment, she went on hunger strikes to protest the prison's acts of cruelty, which included not allowing her to phone her children.
Russian law allows sentencing to be delayed when a mother has very young children, but Bakhmina's request was denied. The US State Department's Human Rights report in 2006 noted her case as one that many consider to be politically motivated. In December of 2008, Bakhmina gave birth to a girl. In violation of Russian law, her application for parole was denied.
She was finally granted parole and released from jail in April of 2009, after more than 90,000 people signed a petition addressed to President Medvedev demanding her release.
Vasily Aleksanyan
Vasily Aleksanyan was also a lawyer for Yukos. On March 30, 2006, he was appointed executive vice-president of Yukos, and within one week he was arrested. Aleksanyan's case became a cause of heightened concern after a prosecutor revealed that he had been diagnosed with HIV/AIDS.
Aleksanyan accused authorities of denying him proper medical attention as a punishment for not "cooperating" by testifying against Yukos executives. In February 2008, Aleksanyan was finally transferred to a hospital after four requests made by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). Even in hospital, he remained under arrest while receiving treatment for HIV, and for the lymphatic cancer that he developed in detention while being refused anti-retroviral treatment. On December 30, 2008, almost a year after the ECtHR ruling in his favor, Aleksanyan was released after posting $1.8 million bail, an unprecedented amount in Russia, and has since then been receiving medical treatment for AIDS and cancer.
The case against Aleksanyan was finally dropped in June 2010.