Lebedev case

Yesterday, lawyers for the head of MFO MENATEP Platon Lebedev received a letter from the Chairman of the Moscow City Court Olga Egorova, who refused to initiate supervisory proceedings in a criminal case in which Platon Lebedev and Mikhail Khodorkovsky were sentenced to eight years in prison for fraud, tax evasion and other crimes. “Ms. Egorova did not notice most of our arguments,” lawyer Konstantin Rivkin, who plans to complain about the above-mentioned verdict to the Supreme Court, told Kommersant.

The supervisory appeal of the lawyers of Mr. Lebedev Evgeniy Baru and Konstantin Rivkin was considered by the head of the Moscow City Court for two months and 22 days. Yesterday, the defenders received a response from Olga Egorova, who admitted that there were no grounds for initiating supervisory proceedings, since the verdict of the Meshchansky District Court of May 16 last year and the ruling of the cassation board of the city court of September 22 of the same year in this case were legal and justified. Previously, a similar response was sent to lawyers signed by City Court Judge Natalya Smirnova.

“Only three paragraphs are devoted to the analysis of our arguments in Ms. Egorova’s response,” lawyer Konstantin Rivkin told a Kommersant correspondent. “Thus, the defense pointed out that the verdict of the Meshchansky District Court was illegally based on documents seized by investigators of the Prosecutor General’s Office in the office of Mr. Khodorkovsky’s lawyer Anton Drel in the village of Zhukovka. Meanwhile, the Constitutional Court, in its ruling dated November 8, 2005 #439-0, recognized that to conduct a search in a lawyer’s office, court permission was required, which in this case was not obtained. Consequently, the documents seized during the search (they concerned. mainly payment of taxes. - Kommersant ), are unacceptable and cannot be used as the basis for the verdict. However, the chairman of the Moscow City Court wrote in response: the investigators of the Prosecutor General’s Office did not know that they were searching the law office. This is an obvious untruth: the investigators were immediately told about this by those who were there. office staff."

The head of the Moscow City Court, according to Mr. Rivkin, did not react at all to most of the arguments contained in the supervisory complaint. For example, lawyers reported that Judge Smirnova, who had previously rejected their complaint, erroneously indicated that Platon Lebedev was provided with benefits “for tax exemption for individuals providing consulting services.” In fact, according to defenders, these were not benefits, but “a special tax regime provided for in Article 18 of the Tax Code.” In addition, the defense attorneys indicated in the complaint that Judge Smirnova substantiated Mr. Lebedev’s guilt in tax evasion by Yukos “by calculating taxes not paid by Khodorkovsky,” which, according to the lawyers, is an imposition of criminal liability by analogy and “cannot be understood logically.” -legal level."

The head of the Moscow City Court also ignored the error in the verdict of the Meshchansky Court, cited in the defense’s complaint: “Lebedev P.L. knew for certain that the received under the agreement for the provision of paid services was 1,237,100 rubles, including from the foreign company Status Services Limited 4,819 350 rubles...". “The petty-bourgeois judges,” Konstantin Rivkin commented on this phrase, “in all seriousness claim that four million is less than one million, and Mrs. Egorova tacitly agrees with them.”

In the coming days, Mr. Lebedev’s lawyers are going to send a supervisory complaint to the Supreme Court, which has been considering a similar complaint from Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s defenders since May 29 of this year. According to Mr. Rivkin, who recently visited his client Lebedev in the colony, “he is very actively involved in drawing up various documents submitted both to the Russian courts and to the European Court in Strasbourg.” True, prisoner Lebedev does not have any special illusions: in a recent interview with one of the media, he said that what worries him most is “the idiocy of judges and all sorts of arbiters of the country’s destinies.”

EKATERINA Kommersant-ZAPODINSKAYA

The head of the Moscow City Court confirmed errors in the verdict