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Former Yukos oil tycoon Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky started to talk in his trial

For a year, Russia’s most famous prisoner, Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, sat in a glass cage in a dingy, third-floor courtroom and listened while prosecutors sought to prolong his time behind bars by charging that he embezzled billions of dollars worth of oil.

Former Yukos oil tycoon Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky started to talk in his trial

For a year, Russia’s most famous prisoner, Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, sat in a glass cage in a dingy, third-floor courtroom and listened while prosecutors sought to prolong his time behind bars by charging that he embezzled billions of dollars worth of oil. On Tuesday, Mr. Khodorkovsky finally got a chance to speak in his own defense in the politically tinged case. The former oil magnate used his testimony to quickly contend that the new charges against him — like those that put him in prison the first time — are motivated by politics and corruption.

Speaking from notes passed by lawyers into his cage, he portrayed the long, winding legal proceedings against him and a business partner as “legal schizophrenia,” saying he was being accused of stealing oil he had already been convicted of failing to pay tax on. Arrested in 2003, Mr. Khodorkovsky became an early and vivid example of the policies of Vladimir V. Putin — then Russia’s president and now its prime minister — to consolidate control of the petroleum industry and crack down on opposition parties Mr. Khodorkovsky had been funding. Mr. Putin said at the time he was prosecuting a tax evader, and has recently been stepping up the criticism, comparing Mr. Khodorkovsky to Al Capone and telling a national television call-in show that the oil executive had ordered contract murders. Mr. Khodorkovsky faces another 14 years behind bars if he is convicted on the new charges.

In a meandering trial that began in March 2009, prosecutors accuse the tycoon and a business partner, Platon Lebedev, of misappropriating crude oil from the publicly traded Yukos Oil Company before its main assets were taken over by the state oil company Rosneft. Prosecutors say the two embezzled about 2.5 billion barrels of crude between 1998 and 2003, or about a third of the United States’ entire annual consumption of oil. The defense has pointed out that Yukos did not pump that volume over those years. Mr. Khodorkovsky pointed out Tuesday what he said was a hole in the prosecution’s case: that the government could not argue both that he failed to pay taxes on oil profits at Yukos and also that he had embezzled the oil from the company.

Karinna A. Moskalenko, a lawyer representing Mr. Khodorkovsky in an appeal of the tax evasion case at the European Court of Human Rights, in Strasbourg, France, filed a motion this week with the Moscow court noting the contradiction and arguing that standard legal practice would prohibit prosecutors from taking different positions on fact in different proceedings. The Russian prosecutor, Valery Lakhtin, said the defense was misconstruing the case. “Mr. Khodorkovsky didn’t read the accusations against him carefully,” he said. Though the vast majority of Russians have long since abandoned any interest in the particulars of Mr. Khodorkovsky’s trial, the outcome will surely be seen as something of a political litmus test for the country.

An acquittal or eventual pardon would be seen as a sign of the ascendancy of President Dmitri A. Medvedev, who has advocated an overhaul of the legal system that developed under Mr. Putin, his predecessor and mentor. In this light, even the trial’s languid pace is significant, suggesting some drift in political direction. In fact, it has become one of the longest in Russian history, according to the defense lawyers.

The prosecutors stretched out their arguments from March 31, 2009, until March 29 this year. For a good part of that time, through the summer months from April until September, they merely read aloud from their 60,000 pages of case material to enter it in the court record.



Author: Andrew E. Kramer


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