The Meshchansky District Court found YUKOS co-owner Vasily Shakhnovsky guilty of tax evasion. The former president of YUKOS-Moscow LLC was sentenced to one year in prison, but was released from punishment "due to a change in the situation."

Shakhnovsky was accused of receiving compensation for his work at YUKOS and Rosprom in 1998-2000 in the form of payment for fictitious consulting services to the Isle of Man-based firm Status Service Ltd. According to the prosecutor's office, having purchased a patent for an entrepreneur without a legal entity (PEBOYUL) for 8,500 rubles, the YUKOS top manager concealed 28.5 million rubles from the budget and social funds. Shakhnovsky, although he paid 53 million rubles to the budget last fall, did not admit guilt.

"Now I have a criminal record in my 46-year life," Shakhnovsky sadly stated. The prosecutor's office, which had demanded that he be sent to a penal colony for a year and a half, has already announced that it is satisfied with the sentence. Shakhnovsky himself does not yet know whether he will challenge the court's verdict. Moreover, strictly speaking, he has not acquired a "criminal record."

Lawyers advise thousands of "former" PBOYUL not to panic: the Shakhnovsky case is unlikely to be widely publicized, since the authorities are interested in the "tax history" of the co-owners of "Yukos" for political, not legal reasons. That is, without setting themselves the task of "revising the results of tax optimization."

In this case, the Shakhnovsky case will go down in the history of Russian democracy as the first and so far isolated case of "soft lustration". In the early 90s, the idea of cutting off the former Soviet elite from government positions by introducing a ban on former party apparatchiks and security officers from holding "sensitive" positions was popular among the victorious democrats. But in a country whose president was a former candidate for membership in the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee, this idea was doomed.

But for the majority of entrepreneurs who made their names and fortunes in the chaos of the 1990s, the conviction of Shakhnovsky (who, by the way, was part of President Boris Yeltsin's campaign staff in 1996) means a ban on participation in public politics. The court has effectively confirmed the rightness of 90% of voters who are confident that the large fortunes of the "new Russians" were acquired illegally. At the end of Putin's first term, business was removed from political power once and for all.

Vladimir Fedorin

MAN OF THE WEEK: Beyond Politics