"Crazy Charges"

Khodorkovsky and Lebedev counted $25 billion in criminal proceeds

Investigators from the Prosecutor General's Office yesterday brought new charges against the former head of the Menatep MFO Platon Lebedev and the former head of the Yukos oil company Mikhail Khodorkovsky. In 2005, they were already sentenced to eight years in prison under seven articles of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation - for fraud, tax evasion, embezzlement, causing property damage, failure to comply with a court decision, etc. Now the former co-owners of YUKOS have been charged with only two charges - “embezzlement or embezzlement,” which appeared in their previous case, and “legalization (laundering) of funds or other property acquired by criminal means by an organized group on a large scale.” However, the scale of stolen and “laundered” funds this time appears completely different in the case materials. If earlier we were talking about millions of dollars and billions of rubles, now Lebedev and Khodorkovsky are being exposed for tens of billions of dollars. According to the defendants' lawyers, in the new case the Prosecutor General's Office accuses them of misappropriation and laundering of no less than 23-25 ​​billion dollars (note that the entire federal budget of Russia in 2000 was about 30 billion dollars). Defenders of the disgraced oligarchs said yesterday that “this is not even absurd, but madness,” since “it is simply impossible to steal that kind of money.”

In principle, the very fact of new charges being brought against Khodorkovsky and Lebedev and their nature did not come as a surprise. Representatives of the Prosecutor General's Office announced such intentions even before their sentencing in 2005 . “We are talking about the legalization of criminally acquired funds, which amount to billions of rubles. The state and citizens were shamelessly robbed.” A little later, the Prosecutor General’s Office detailed these claims in official reports: “The investigation has information that during 2000-2003, some managers and employees of the Yukos Oil Company stole and legalized funds in the amount of about $7 billion by transferring them abroad. The investigation “Schemes have been identified designed to steal proceeds from oil production and then legalize it by paying dividends to shell companies registered in a number of foreign countries.” The mentioned amount of $7 billion even then seemed clearly overestimated; many considered it a kind of PR stunt of the investigation. However, the figures announced yesterday exceeded all expectations.

How investigators calculated such, without exaggeration, “crazy” amounts of funds stolen and laundered by Khodorkovsky and Lebedev remains unclear. The Prosecutor General's Office did not comment on anything other than the fact of the filing of charges. And the lawyers, according to them, have not yet even had time to simply navigate the huge mass of incriminating documents. Although they could: it is increasingly obvious that the “second edition” of this case is no different from the first except for mind-blowing numbers.

However, this no longer matters for the future fate of the former YUKOS shareholders. The scale of the charges brought against Khodorkovsky and Lebedev may have made it clear that they were not “jailed,” but imprisoned “seriously and for a very long time.” And all their attempts to achieve the opportunity to be released next year, using the right to parole, make no sense. However, legal experts unanimously point out that denial of parole can be achieved in much simpler ways. It is no coincidence that one of the Russian observers, asking the question: “Why all the current series of blows on already hammered nails?”, came to the disappointing conclusion that this is simply an act of revenge.

The procedure for bringing charges against Khodorkovsky and Lebedev took place yesterday in the building of the Chita Regional Prosecutor's Office. The convicts themselves and their lawyers had been waiting for this event for more than two months, since December last year, when they were transferred from the colonies where they were serving their sentences to the Chita pre-trial detention center. However, for unknown reasons, the official filing of charges was constantly postponed. Representatives of the Prosecutor General's Office made it clear that this would happen any day now; lawyers for Khodorkovsky and Lebedev constantly traveled to Chita, but each time everything was limited to carrying out some kind of “investigative actions”, which consisted mainly, according to the lawyers, in arguing between them and their clients with investigators .

At the end of the next week, unofficial reports appeared that, under the pretext of ensuring the security of the investigative group of the Prosecutor General's Office, more than a hundred intelligence officers arrived in Chita. However, even at this, the long-awaited presentation of charges almost fell through. On Sunday, the lawyers, without whom it is impossible to carry out this procedural action, were detained by police officers at Domodedovo airport on a flight to Chita and underwent a thorough search, which is why they almost missed the plane.

As Lebedev’s lawyer Evgeny Baru said, yesterday security measures were suddenly strengthened in Chita itself. The building of the regional prosecutor's office was cordoned off. According to Khodorkovsky’s lawyer Yuri Schmidt, the roads to the prosecutor’s office were blocked: “There is a police squad at every intersection. There are armed riot police and the Ministry of Internal Affairs near the prosecutor’s office building.”

Platon Lebedev was the first to be charged, after which investigators spoke with Mikhail Khodorkovsky. According to lawyer Konstantin Rivkin, the text of the indictment takes up 148 pages, and a representative of the prosecutor's office read it for almost three hours. “There are fabulous sums of money involved, dozens of people and companies. On Tuesday we will meet with the client to discuss what to do next. There is absurdity there, but I won’t talk about it, since we signed a non-disclosure agreement,” he noted. “Lebedev is now in the Chita pre-trial detention center, in the coming days the court will choose a preventive measure for him.”

Khodorkovsky’s lawyer Karina Moskalenko was laconic but emotional: “We would really like to talk about the essence of the charges brought against us, but we were limited in this under pain of criminal liability. Considering what happened at the airport, I have no doubt about the determination of our law enforcement agencies. The mentioned sums made the hair on my head stand up. I can say that we do not understand why the prosecutor’s office included among the stolen amounts money that passed through the accounting department and on which taxes were paid,” she only noted.

Yuri Schmidt spoke about the essence of the new claims of the Prosecutor General's Office as follows: “It is estimated that we are talking about 23-25 ​​billion dollars. The accusation was previously known from the press. We are talking about the companies Fargoil and Ratibor. The accusation is delusional, because it is impossible for anyone, anywhere, and ever to steal such an amount. This is more than the company's revenue."

The Prosecutor General's Office did not comment on the charges brought against the ex-oligarchs. However, the essence of the new charges is generally clear. Apparently, Khodorkovsky and Lebedev are considered guilty of selling oil produced by Yukos subsidiaries at reduced prices (the so-called intra-corporate prices, which were used by almost all major oil companies). After this, through sales and resales through a number of companies located in preferential tax zones (which, note, then functioned officially, according to the law), the cost of oil increased from 49 to 150 dollars per ton. The profit received was accumulated in the accounts of companies affiliated with YUKOS, Ratibor and Fargoil. And then, according to investigators, the money was transferred abroad. The former leaders of Ratibor and Fargoil, Vladimir Malakhovsky and Antonio Valdez-Garcia, were detained quite a long time ago, and the investigation’s version of this scheme has already been cited many times in open sources. According to the Prosecutor General's Office, as a result of the activities of this organized group, the amount stolen amounted to 13 billion dollars, of which 8.5 billion were legalized. True, it is not clear why, in relation to Khodorkovsky and Lebedev, the amount of stolen and laundered funds increased significantly. One can only assume that the investigation accuses them of developing and managing not only this scheme (through Ratibor and Fargoil), but also money laundering through other companies.

Alexey IVLEV, Alexey GRISHIN