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Mikhail Khodorkovsky called the charges against him absurd, and Platon Lebedev himself accused the investigators of criminal matters

“In the resolution I received to bring him as a defendant, the investigation repeated the absurdity that I had stolen all of YUKOS’s oil over six years of activity,” this is how Mikhail Khodorkovsky reacted yesterday to the charge that the Investigative Committee of the Russian Prosecutor’s Office (SKP) brought against him on Monday . In fact, we are talking about bringing the same charges that were already formulated in February last year in the so-called second YUKOS case of oil theft and laundering of 450 billion rubles. and $7.5 billion between 1998 and 2004.

Then Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his comrade in business and criminal cases, the former head of the Menatep MFO Platon Lebedev, in the Chita pre-trial detention center began to familiarize themselves with the materials of this criminal case. However, during the presidential elections, the investigation suddenly received new civil plaintiffs who asked to include in the case their statements for compensation for damage allegedly caused by the actions of the accused. That is why Khodorkovsky and Lebedev were torn away from reading their new case and the investigation was extended, which ended this Monday with a new and old accusation. On the same day, the lawyers stated that the new version of the charges had not undergone any changes. “There are no new episodes, the qualifications of the accused’s actions have not been changed, the text of the previous decision of February 3, 2007 has undergone minor revision,” they said.

Yesterday, the website of the press center for the defense of Mikhail Khodorkovsky posted the texts of the testimony that the disgraced oligarch and Mr. Lebedev gave in connection with the document drawn up by the Investigative Committee against them. Mr. Khodorkovsky, in particular, said: what the investigation is doing “testifies to the complete disbelief of law enforcement agencies in the success of the workto create an independent judicial system .” He is sure that the content of the accusation cannot even be the subject of discussion in court, and he briefly explained why.

“What the prosecution calls “legalization”, there are individual examples of a large number of ordinary transactions for the placement (temporary) of funds of the vertically integrated oil company YUKOS by the company’s treasury in the Russian and international financial markets, as well as its other ordinary financial and economic activities, accordingly reflected in statements of individual legal entities and in the consolidated statements of YUKOS,” says the text of his testimony. Exactly the same statements, allowing you to see all the income, expenses, assets and liabilities of companies, as Mr. Khodorkovsky noted, were regularly published and published by all the same vertically integrated oil corporations as YUKOS - Gazprom, Rosneft, " Gazprom Neft", LUKOIL, TNK, etc. All these documents are open, accessible and, as the disgraced oligarch points out, could and should have been studied by investigators. “If the investigation, contrary to my expectations, does not violate the law, but collects and attaches to the case the documents I indicated, then I am ready to give the necessary explanations on them. Until this moment, I don’t want to explain anything further,” he concluded.

Platon Lebedev spoke much more categorically. In response to the accusation brought against him, he himself declared the investigators to be criminals. “Regarding the obviously false and slanderous accusations brought against me by the criminal investigation, after consultation with the defense, I decided to refuse to give detailed testimony, since I consider them meaningless. It is obvious that after repeating the next schizophrenic (this is from a medical point of view) and deliberately false (this is from a legal point of view) statements, Alyshev (investigator of the Investigative Committee of the Investigative Committee, leading the second YUKOS case. - Ed. ), acting in an organized criminal group as a member, I’m not capable of anything else, and therefore I decided that it was pointless to explain anything to the criminal punks,” his statement says. According to Mr. Lebedev, investigator Alyshev, in particular, “falsified the episode of theft by appropriating 38% of the shares of OJSC VNK, owned by the Russian Federation, and their legalization.”

“Please consider my real testimony as a report of a crime,” the former head of Menatep summed up his speech.

Ekaterina BUTORINA