Hoping for the Supreme Court...

According to the Kommersant newspaper, the Supreme Court requested the criminal cases of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev from the Meshchansky and Khamovnichesky district courts of Moscow. This happened just when their lawyers turned to the Investigative Committee with a statement to bring the judges of the Moscow City Court to criminal liability for forgery. This forgery, according to lawyers, was committed during the consideration of the supervisory complaint sent to the Moscow City Court by order of the Chairman of the Supreme Court Vyacheslav Lebedev.

The Supreme Court decided to look into the cases of Khodorkovsky and Lebedev again after receiving complaints about the verdicts.

Let us recall that last year the Chairman of the Supreme Court Lebedev already initiated supervisory proceedings, sending complaints from the YUKOS defense to the Presidium of the Moscow City Court. Having considered them on December 20, 2012, the presidium slightly adjusted the verdict of the Khamovnichesky court in terms of the volume of stolen oil and, bringing the verdict in line with the amendments made to the Criminal Code, reduced the prison term for Khodorkovsky and Lebedev from 13 to 11 years.

The defense hopes that the Supreme Court, unlike the Presidium of the Moscow City Court, will pay attention to violations committed during the consideration of cases. For example, we are talking about the fact that the resolution of the Moscow City Court states that the Yukos oil producing companies did not make a profit during the sale of oil. Moreover, from the text of the verdict of the Khamovnichesky Court it follows that these companies received a profit of three billion dollars.

According to Platon Lebedev’s lawyers, the resolution of the Presidium of the Moscow City Court “contains an outright lie about the transportation of oil by the state company Transneft using some “fictitious” documents, about which there is not a word either in the accusation or in the verdict.” In addition, the resolution stated that “the general agreements on the conditions for the sale of oil by the victims established certain ‘reduced’ prices,” although, according to the lawyers, these agreements “do not contain information on prices at all.”

Lawyers, of course, are absolutely right to use all available means to protect their clients. However, it is quite obvious that decisions in this case are not made in the Moscow court or in the Supreme Court. They are accepted in the Kremlin, where the absurdities in the verdicts do not bother anyone at all.