| Khodorkovsky's lawyers and the authorities accused each other of putting pressure on judges Today marks the second week of announcing the verdict in the capital’s Meshchansky District Court in the case of ex-head of YUKOS Mikhail Khodorkovsky and head of the Menatep MFO Platon Lebedev. By the end of last week, nothing significant had happened: for five days the court assessed only one episode out of eleven charged against the defendants. Interest in the verdict is falling all the time, and the Meshchansky court, where last Monday it was possible to break through only with great difficulty, is now emptying day by day. But passions are literally boiling over the verdict of the oligarch, who has every chance of becoming the longest-serving prisoner in the world. Some representatives of the Prosecutor General's Office and the State Duma accuse the media and lawyers of putting pressure on the court. The defense of Khodorkovsky and Lebedev, in turn, makes similar claims against the authorities.
Last Friday, the Meshchansky Court continued to state its position regarding the accusation of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev of malicious failure to comply with the decision of the arbitration court to invalidate the sale and purchase transaction of 44% of the shares of the Scientific Institute of Fertilizers and Insectofungicides (NIUIF). Having found the guilt of the defendants fully proven, the court cited the same arguments in support of this as when accusing them of committing fraud with these securities. That is, virtually all last week the trio of judges talked about the same episode, which constitutes only a small part of the total verdict. “This is aimed at creating the appearance of validity of the motivation for the verdict,” Lebedev’s lawyer Elena Liptser expressed her attitude to what was happening. The audience in the hall hardly pays attention to what the judges say; many simply fall asleep.
On Thursday, only four of 18 defense attorneys showed up for the verdict. On Friday, during the break, Mikhail Khodorkovsky's parents could not stand it and also left. “Now they are engaged in chatter. It seems that they are preparing literature on how to develop a business,” said Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s father, Boris Moiseevich, irritably. And then the oligarch’s foreign lawyers left. “What is happening in the Meshchansky Court is not a trial, it is a funeral. They are burying Khodorkovsky with a mass of paper on which words are written that have no meaning,” said Khodorkovsky’s Canadian lawyer Robert Amsterdam, who believes that “there is no such practice in the world of such a long announcement of the verdict.”
The security of the building of the Meshchansky Court and the adjacent territory, meanwhile, does not weaken. On Friday, a police dog handler was on duty at the entrance to the court with a spaniel named Dina, specially trained to search for explosives. The dog's owner said that so far Dina has not been able to find anything suspicious in the courthouse. Khodorkovsky's supporters are not allowed to approach the court - everyone who "dared" to wear a T-shirt with the inscription "freedom of MBH" is sent back. Only those who insist on condemning the oligarch are allowed to express their attitude to what is happening: about a hundred of these people stood silently for four days with their posters in front of the Meshchansky Court.
The authorities are showing unflagging interest in the announcement of Khodorkovsky’s verdict. First, Deputy Prosecutor General Vladimir Kolesnikov declared that it was inadmissible to put pressure on the court and asked “not to put pressure from all sides” on judge Irina Kolesnikova “and to respect her, first of all, as a woman.” Then State Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov took pity on the “overwhelmed” judge: “The trial took a very long time, there were a lot of volumes of the criminal case, and I can only express my condolences to the judges who have to read the verdict for so long. They will read for as long as there are volumes written.” True, what exactly Mr. Gryzlov meant by this remains not entirely clear. The Khodorkovsky and Lebedev case contains 390 volumes, and if you follow the logic of the State Duma speaker, the reading of the verdict could last a whole year.
And a certain initiative group of deputies even asked President Putin to influence the verdict against Khodorkovsky, since they believe that he must certainly be guilty. Although no one has any doubts that the YUKOS case is a political matter and has only a formal relation to the criminal process, never before have representatives of the legislative branch allowed themselves to appeal to the executive branch with a demand to influence the judicial branch, which, by the way, is determined our Constitution as independent and subject only to the law.
Mikhail Khodorkovsky's lawyers, by the way, immediately responded to such statements. “We agree that there is pressure on the court, but it comes from the prosecutor’s office, not from us,” said Robert Amsterdam. Lawyer Anton Drel said the same thing: “During this process, we have repeatedly witnessed such pressure. Literally the day before the announcement of the verdict in the case of Khodorkovsky and Lebedev, representative of the Prosecutor General’s Office Natalya Vishnyakova announced the prosecutor’s office’s intention to bring new charges against our clients. We regard this step as an obvious intention to discredit our clients in the eyes of the court, as well as to put pressure on the judges in order to tighten the sentence that is being read out now.” Lawyer Heinrich Padva agreed with him: “This is a provocation. This is an outrageous, flagrant violation of the law."
YOUR OPINION Ekaterina BUTORINA |
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