Eye of Padva

The past week was relatively short on high-profile trials. On June 23, the Meshchansky District Court of Moscow once again postponed consideration of the merits of the case on charges against Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Platon Lebedev and Andrei Krainev. This time - until July 12.

Has petty-bourgeois justice been jinxed?

Let us recall that the last time the court hearing opened on June 16, but was immediately postponed to June 23 due to the request of Khodorkovsky’s defender, the famous lawyer Genrikh Padva, who had undergone eye surgery the day before.

The operation was successful, and already on June 22, Genrikh Pavlovich appeared in the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation to protect the interests of his other eminent client, Anatoly Bykov. Having considered his case by way of supervision, the Supreme Court changed the classification of Bykov’s act and ruled that the entrepreneur was guilty of organizing not the attempted murder of Vilor Struganov (aka “Pasha Tsvetomuzyka”), but preparations for murder, but left the punishment - six and a half years of suspended imprisonment - in force. Ironically, on June 15, the Krasnoyarsk Regional Court convicted Struganov himself with a very similar wording - incitement to murder. But “Pasha Tsvetomuzyka”, whom Padva, of course, did not defend, received not a suspended sentence for this, but a real one - nine years in prison to be served in a maximum security colony.

However, let's return to the Khodorkovsky case. On June 23, Heinrich Padva sent a statement to the Meshchansky Court with a request to postpone the hearing again, since on June 28 he was to have the sutures placed during the operation removed. The court again granted his request and postponed the hearing to July 12. At the same time, the request of several lawyers Lebedev and Krainev, who later began their defense, was also satisfied, and therefore asked to be given additional time to familiarize themselves with the case.

Let us note that the Code of Criminal Procedure of the Russian Federation does not limit a citizen in any way in the number of lawyers. He is free to hire as many of them as his means allow. Therefore, one cannot fail to note the modesty of the billionaire Khodorkovsky, for whom six lawyers were enough. But Mikhail Borisovich went even further along the path of voluntary self-restraint, officially declaring to the court that to work directly in the courtroom, only two defenders would be enough for him.

This modest prisoner-oligarch turned 41 on June 26. On this occasion, representatives of Open Russia, the group " Conscience " and the youth organization "Conscience", led by former PR woman of Khakamada and SPS Marina Litvinovich , appeared under the walls of the "Matrosskaya Silence" pre-trial detention center, where the prisoner is being held, with loud firecrackers, champagne and bears (albeit teddy bears). Moreover, they did not give any notice of this very noisy action, but the police did not interfere with them. Another illustration of Karamzin’s famous thesis about the severity of Russian laws, softened by the optionality of their implementation.

Meanwhile, Viktor Gerashchenko, who is considered a hidden creature of the Kremlin, was elected chairman of the board of directors of YUKOS. It is noteworthy, by the way, that among the numerous charges brought against Khodorkovsky and Lebedev, episodes directly related to YUKOS hardly appear. Although it is no secret that this company, valued at $21 billion, was acquired by Menatep shareholders for only $350 million.

Don't drive Volna

So, the first and most serious episode of the accusation can be considered already written off in the archives due to the expiration of the ten-year statute of limitations provided by law. Khodorkovsky, Lebedev and Krainev will never answer for him. And no one will answer.

In 1994, the Property Fund of the Murmansk Region decided to sell at an investment auction a 20 percent stake in Apatit OJSC in the city of Kirovsk, where phosphate raw materials for fertilizers were almost monopoly produced. Possession of this block of shares actually made it possible to manage the enterprise, and Khodorkovsky and Lebedev, who at that time held the posts of chairman of the board of directors and president of Menatep Bank, respectively, had their eyes on it. The special temptation of the deal was that the Property Fund directly had to pay only two hundred thousand dollars - the cost of a good Moscow apartment. The rest, much more significant money, according to the terms of the competition, should have been invested in the enterprise within a year.

Only a noisy crowd of dummy legal entities with meaningless names took part in the investment competition: JSC Volna, Malachite, Flora and Intermedinvest. All of them were nominally headed by relatively minor clerks - Khodorkovsky's subordinates. The competition, according to pre-assigned roles, was “won” by Volna JSC, where the vice-chairman was a certain Andrei Krainev, who now found himself in the dock - though not under escort. On July 28, 1994, Volna signed an investment agreement, pledging to invest more than $283 million in production within a year. Which, of course, she didn’t do. And she couldn’t, which Khodorkovsky knew very well from the very beginning and which, according to the investigation , “was covered by his criminal intent.” The investigation classifies all this as fraud on an especially large scale, carried out as part of an organized group using their official position. The Murmansk Region Property Fund was, according to investigators, “misled,” which for some reason sounds unconvincing.

In subsequent episodes, Krainev’s last name does not appear, so he can consider himself already free from all charges. It was in vain that his lawyers tried to spoil their eyes by reading the criminal case. As for Khodorkovsky and Lebedev, the other “small things” that will inevitably remain in the case, with a strong judge’s desire, can still collectively provide them with more than one year of stay behind bars.

Bloody PR for a funny republic

In the middle of last week, Vladimir Popov, the self-proclaimed “supreme ruler” of the funny “ Russian Republic, ” took responsibility for the murder of St. Petersburg ethnographer Nikolai Girenko. Allegedly, on June 12, he sentenced the scientist to death . It is obvious that Popov either ascribes to himself someone else’s “fame”, or, if he is really involved in this crime, he knows for sure that the investigation will not find any evidence against him.

The medieval doctrine of confession of guilt as the “queen of evidence” (for some reason in our country it is often called the “Vyshinsky doctrine”) has long since sunk into oblivion. The Criminal Procedure Code of the Russian Federation takes the position of free assessment by the court of evidence in its entirety. And an admission of guilt is one of the worst of them: it alone is never enough. “The admission by the accused of his guilt in committing a crime can be used as the basis for the charge only if his guilt is confirmed by the totality of evidence available in the criminal case,” says Part 2 of Art. 77 Code of Criminal Procedure of the Russian Federation. Therefore, no matter how disgusting such bloody PR may be, Vladimir Popov, it seems, is not risking anything.