I feel sorry for the judge

Mikhail Khodorkovsky gave an interview to the Kommersant-Vlast magazine, in which he stated that the sentence against him and Platon Lebedev, “without any doubt,” was not written by Judge Danilkin, thus expressing agreement with the press attache of the Khamovnichesky Court, Natalya Vasilyeva. However, Khodorkovsky and Lebedev’s lawyers had previously expressed assumptions that the judge was not the author of the text of the verdict.

Khodorkovsky admitted that he felt sorry for Danilkin: in his opinion, the judge “in general, is a good person, moderately conscientious, moderately professional,” who was “broken, and broken cruelly.”

According to Khodorkovsky, the verdict “was written by several people who were not present at the trial. Moreover, the general text was either not edited, or the editor is not a lawyer. This is provable, and the evidence can become the basis for a criminal case against the actual authors of the verdict.” But such a criminal case, he said, “can only be investigated under effective presidential control.”

Khodorkovsky was asked who he would add to the list of people involved in his trial who should not be allowed into the EU countries (the idea of ​​compiling such a list was voiced at a meeting of the European Parliament before the adoption of a resolution on the situation with justice in Russia, but in the final text didn't hit). The businessman replied that he is not impartial and cannot decide this, but he knows that he will never forgive investigators Salavat Karimov and Tatyana Rusanova for “participating in the torture” of Vasily Aleksanyan, and he also “really wants to know who personally decided to send him to prison” Svetlana Bakhmina and “who crippled” the former general director of Fargol LLC, a subsidiary of YUKOS, Antonio Valdez-Garcia. Valdez-Garcia said that investigators beat him, trying to force self-incrimination and testimony against Khodorkovsky, and according to the official version, he allegedly fell out of the window himself.

Political responsibility for the trials in the YUKOS case, according to Khodorkovsky, “initially rests with Putin.”

Answering the question why Khodorkovsky defended himself in the Khamovnichesky court, but was not going to sue Prime Minister Vladimir Putin for statements about his involvement in the murders, the entrepreneur replied that in the Khamovnichesky court he “fought the insane accusation of stealing all the oil produced ""with the help of indisputable, irrefutable documents", many of which the court "accepted and recognized", only this was not included in the verdict, and as for Putin, then, in his opinion, "there are ready-made courts and fabricated judicial acts for all", “Putin has an “opinion” about my involvement,” and “there’s not even a need to fabricate anything else.” Khodorkovsky denied accusations of involvement in the murders.

Khodorkovsky admitted that he tries to treat President Dmitry Medvedev “with understanding and sometimes even with sympathy,” but that Medvedev could have done more. Medvedev, in his opinion, “this is a chance to enter the trajectory of normal development.”