Forty terms

The YUKOS case has become the most massive trial in the history of modern Russia

The largest river shipping company in Russia and Europe, Volgotanker, was created by the People's Commissar of Water Transport of the USSR Nikolai Yezhov in 1938. After 70 years, the company was declared bankrupt, and the sale of its assets has been going on for more than a year. "Volgotanker" survived the transition from socialism to capitalism, withstood privatization and changes of owners. The Volgotanker did not survive the big purge of the 2000s - the YUKOS affair - and died. Khodorkovsky owned the Volgotanker for only a few years and sold it to the company's managers in 2000. But past ties with YUKOS were enough for the new owners to be convicted under tax charges, and the shipping company was buried along with the empire of the disgraced oligarch.

Westminster County Judge Nicholas Evans admitted that the Volgotanker case was a Yukosov case. He called it political and refused to Russia to extradite former top manager of the shipping company Andrei Azarov. The YUKOS case has become the largest in terms of the number of defendants in the entire history of criminal offenses in modern Russia. Even in the case of the rebellion in Nalchik, fewer people are being tried than in various cases related to Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s company. The YUKOS case is a whole network of criminal cases that involves dozens of people, from company managers and lawyers to city mayors, tax officials, lawyers and even drivers. And the Volgotanker is just one, albeit a very large, chip that flew off when YUKOS was being cut down. The number of people convicted and accused in 20 criminal cases directly or indirectly related to the YUKOS case exceeded 70 people. 25 of them received various sentences and are now in prison, more than 30 are on the run. Nine received suspended sentences, mostly in exchange for cooperation with the investigation. Cases against five people are still ongoing and sentences could be handed down this year. And this is not the end.

“If you don’t take into account the pre-war trials of enemies of the people and the doctors’ case in 1952, I don’t remember such a case. Well, maybe high-profile “cotton” or “Krasnodar” cases,” says former head of the Central Bank and ex-chairman of the board of directors of YUKOS Viktor Gerashchenko. Lawyer Genrikh Padva, who defended Khodorkovsky and Lebedev on the first charge in 2003, generally suggests refraining from comparisons. According to him, the YUKOS case has no analogues. As former YUKOS manager Dmitry Gololobov says from London, the logic of the prosecutor's office is such that it creates the ground for bringing more and more new charges. According to former Minister of Economy Yevgeny Yasin, “the YUKOS company has become a free hunting field for the prosecutor’s office, the FSB and the tax service.” “Why were some directors put on the wanted list and others not?” - Gololobov is perplexed. Other ordinary people are almost as perplexed: Khodorkovsky was imprisoned, but the other oligarchs are free. According to Gololobov, from 20 to 25 people may still end up in the dock, and the investigation has an additional resource - to initiate a case under Article 225 (“creation of a criminal community”). It gives up to 25 years.

Those involved in the Yukos cases are divided into several groups: managers, lawyers, officials and ordinary performers - “pawns”. There are cases that the prosecutor's office uses based on the principle of prejudice. This principle assumes that all courts will accept, without verification or evidence, facts established by a court decision or sentence that has already entered into legal force. It works like this: first, for individual episodes, the court gives real sentences to minor defendants, and then the same charges are brought against Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev. This was the case in the first trial, and this is what is happening now. In 2003, Vasily Shakhnovsky was accused of non-payment of income tax, and Andrei Krainov was accused of purchasing a 20% stake in the Apatit enterprise. Then the owners of YUKOS were convicted on these charges.

For the second charge against Khodorkovsky and Lebedev, the key case is the trial of the trading firms Fargoil and Ratibor, which, according to investigators, purchased oil at a reduced price and, after resell it, took more than $13 billion offshore. Yukos top manager Vladimir Pereverzin has already received 11 years in prison, and Ratibor CEO Vladimir Malakhovsky - 12. The third accused, the general director of Fargoil, Spaniard Antonio Valdes-Garcia, managed to escape. One of the most exciting stories in the YUKOS case happened to him.

In the summer of 2005, Garcia agreed to cooperate with the investigation, came to Russia and entered the witness protection program. He was sent to a riot police base near Moscow. The Spaniard was so heavily guarded and, apparently, so persistently persuaded to give the testimony necessary for the investigation that a year later he jumped out of the window. He was brought to the hospital with a traumatic brain injury, concussion, numerous leg fractures and missing teeth. The authorities promised to conduct an investigation into the incident, but in the end only the investigation into the theft of 31 billion rubles by Fargoil progressed. The Spaniard turned from a witness into an accused. But in the midst of the New Year holidays in 2006, he managed to escape. Garcia pretended to be asleep, and when the guard went to the shower, he ran out of the apartment and locked the door behind him. It is unknown where Garcia is hiding now; the prosecutor's office suggested that he fled to London, where most of the defendants in the Yukos cases are holed up.

Of all the categories of Yukosites, only officials did not try to escape. In total, five officials appear in cases related to Yukos. The first to be convicted was the former head of the Russian Federal Property Fund, Vladimir Malin. In 2005, he was given a four-year suspended sentence for underestimating the value of a 20% stake in Apatit. The remaining cases are related to closed administrative-territorial entities - ZATO. Registration in the ZATO completely exempted enterprises from paying most taxes, including land tax, payments for the use of natural resources, water charges, and license fees. The investigation claimed that YUKOS did not conduct any activities in the closed administrative unit, but enjoyed benefits. In 2006, the mayor of the closed city of Lesnoy, Alexander Ivannikov, was sentenced to five years in prison, and in 2008, the former head of the tax inspectorate of Lesnoy, Sergei Karfidov, received four years. For illegal tax breaks for oil workers, Nikolai Lubents, the mayor of another ZATO - the city of Trekhgorny, was given a suspended sentence, and this year a sentence should be passed on ex-tax officer Mikhail Mikhailov. A source close to the former leaders of YUKOS explains the relatively lenient sentences for bureaucrats by the fact that “officials always receive less, since they are class-wise close to the accusers.” Newsweek's source also lists Vasily Shakhnovsky as an official, who before working at YUKOS worked as a manager at the Moscow mayor's office, "so he, like Malin, got off with a suspended sentence."

Aleksey Pichugin and Leonid Nevzlin remain the record holders for long prison sentences. They are sentenced to life imprisonment, only Pichugin is in prison for real, and Nevzlin is on the run. Their articles - murder and organization of murder - stand out from the general wave of economic articles of the rest of the Yukosites. So far, the recently convicted defendants in the Trushin-Kurtsin case have received the most for “economics.” They were accused of embezzling and laundering more than 400 million rubles through fake charitable organizations. The former first vice-president of YUKOS-Moscow, Mikhail Trushin, is wanted, and the deputy head of YUKOS-Moscow, Alexey Kurtsin, was sentenced to 15 years, and the court gave him more than the prosecutor’s office asked for.

Among those convicted are Russian motocross champion Sergei Baldykov and driver Dmitry Shlensky. Shlensky received 11 years in fact for the fact that, at the direction of his superiors, he transported people with suitcases of money from city to city. In April 2006, lawyer Lev Soloviev was able to win over the Moscow City Court. He told how in 2001, riot police mistakenly mistook Shlensky for a bandit and shot up his car. Shlensky barely made it out of the other world and remained disabled. The judge sympathized and reduced the sentence from eleven to five years.