Translated material
Santa Claus in a blue uniform
The Prosecutor General's Office decided to “present” Khodorkovsky, Lebedev and Nevzlin with new charges for the New Year
Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev will celebrate the New Year in the Chita pre-trial detention center and “as a gift” will most likely receive the “long-awaited” charge of committing new crimes from the Prosecutor General’s Office. For a year and a half, the investigation fed them with promises, and yesterday, general phrases and hints finally took the form of more or less clear claims as a result of the interrogation of disgraced oligarchs conducted in the Chita pre-trial detention center.At the same time , the Prosecutor General's Office made a new, and very extravagant, attempt to get another co-owner of YUKOS - Leonid Nevzlin . Last night it was announced that he may be involved in the “Litvinenko case” - a former FSB officer who died in London a month ago from polonium poisoning.
Leonid Nevzlin left Russia in the summer of 1994, almost immediately after the investigation into the “YUKOS case” began, and since then he has been living in Israel, where he received citizenship. The authorities of this country have repeatedly refused to extradite Nevzlin to Russia - Israel, like most countries in the world, does not extradite its citizens . However, the other day Mr. Nevzlin arrived in the United States, and it is with this that the unexpected initiative of the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office is obviously connected.
Yesterday, a message appeared on its official website, from which it followed that the “Litvinenko case” may be connected “with a criminal case accusing a number of senior employees of the Yukos Oil Company of committing crimes against the life and health of citizens.” Evidence has emerged that the “victims” (apparently in the “Litvinenko case”) at one time discovered mercury vapors significantly exceeding permissible standards in their cars, apartments, country houses and offices in both Moscow and London. According to the Prosecutor General's Office, Mr. Nevzlin could also be involved in these crimes. In this connection, the Prosecutor General’s Office intends to “raise the issue of the extradition of a number of citizens hiding abroad,” clearly referring to Nevzlin himself.
However, this initiative is unlikely to find understanding from the United States. The American authorities once, when Nevzlin came there in 1995, already refused to extradite Nevzlin to Russia. This was done then in a very demonstrative form. Official representatives not only referred to the absence of an extradition agreement between Russia and the United States, but also directly stated that by issuing Nevzlin an American visa, they thereby removed the question of discussing the guilt of Khodorkovsky’s associate.
As for Khodorkovsky and Lebedev, as our newspaper reported, they were transferred to the Chita pre-trial detention center at the end of last week. There the lawyers who flew there found their clients. Then the Prosecutor General's Office notified its opponents only that it intended to carry out some investigative actions with Khodorkovsky and Lebedev, but did not expand further. In turn, the administration of the colonies of Krasnokamensk and the village of Kharp in the Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, where the convicts are serving an eight-year sentence on the first sentence, remained silent about the movement of their charges.
Nevertheless, the lawyers had no doubt that they were invited to Chita to be present when new charges were brought against Khodorkovsky and Lebedev. This was supported by the fact that the promised investigative actions were scheduled by the Prosecutor General's Office three months in advance - from December of this year to March of next year.
And yesterday, in the building of the Chita prison, where the exiled Decembrists once visited, Khodorkovsky and Lebedev met their investigators. The former head of YUKOS immediately challenged them all. Platon Lebedev did the same. “They proceeded from a general distrust of the investigative team, most of whose members were investigating the first case,” lawyer Evgeniy Baru told Vremya Novostei.
In response to the protest of the convicts, they were announced to be given the status of suspects. Investigators reported that they consider Khodorkovsky and Lebedev involved in committing a crime under Art. 174.1 of the Criminal Code (legalization by an organized group of persons of large amounts of funds or other property acquired as a result of the commission of a crime). Lawyer Yuri Schmidt explained yesterday that we are talking about the theft of oil from Yukos subsidiaries and subsequent money laundering by issuing donations to the public organization Open Russia , which was founded in 2001 and was financed by this oil corporation and the Menatep group of companies. Mikhail Khodorkovsky officially headed the board of this organization, which aimed at educational, human rights and socially oriented activities.
Investigators from the Prosecutor General’s Office have long been interested in the financial flows of Open Russia, and in March of this year, with court approval, they arrested its accounts, first in the amount of $5.5 million, and then for another 200 thousand rubles. Employees of the public organization started litigation, trying to prove the illegality of the seizure of their accounts, but to no avail. This case became part of the materials collected by the investigation on the alleged legalization of funds by Khodorkovsky and Lebedev, and, apparently, exactly in the amount of the seized accounts of Open Russia.
Yesterday, employees of the Prosecutor General's Office limited themselves to declaring Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev suspects and decided to continue their investigative actions today. Most likely, they are unlikely to delay for long with the official notification of assigning the status of accused to the disgraced oligarchs.