The Prosecutor General's Office demanded the nationalization of the boarding school created by Khodorkovsky's parents, where children from Nord-Ost and Beslan studied

The Prosecutor General's Office filed a lawsuit to turn over the Podmoskovny lyceum boarding school to the state, Interfax reported on Thursday, citing a source. The department motivated this by the fact that the boarding school “actually belongs” to Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev, and the training “is of a politically biased nature.” The institution was created by Khodorkovsky's parents in 1993 for orphans, children from disadvantaged families, as well as children whose parents died in hot spots, terrorist attacks and disasters.

Details. An Interfax source familiar with the claim of the Prosecutor General’s Office reported that the boarding school “is subject to conversion into state revenue, since it actually belongs to the debtors in the enforcement proceedings - Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev.”

• The lawsuit states that the founder of the lyceum since 2004 has been a company registered in the British Virgin Islands, JENSEN CORT LTD. According to the supervisory agency, “this was done to conceal information about its actual owners.” And the institution is financed, according to the Prosecutor General’s Office, by the Khodorkovsky Foundation and the Parringrove company.

• The lawsuit also states that education at the lyceum “is politically biased in nature and forms in children a loyal attitude towards anti-Russian manifestations.”

• The Prosecutor General's Office also asked to seize the property and accounts of the boarding school, Interfax reported. The lyceum management reported that the Meshchansky Court of Moscow had already arrested them on October 3.

• Commenting on the arrest, the lyceum stated that the boarding school “has no financial or ideological connection” with Khodorkovsky and Lebedev. “Since October 2024, the owner of the lyceum is the Foundation for Support and Assistance to the Development of an Educational Organization <...>, the founders of which are exclusively graduates,” the statement says.

• Also in the appeal regarding the seizure of property, the boarding school reported that “teachers and students of the lyceum organize dozens of actions to preserve and strengthen the cultural heritage of the country,” and since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, “they have sent a series of humanitarian supplies for military personnel.”

What kind of boarding school is this? It was created in 1993 on the initiative of Khodorkovsky, and accepted its first students in 1994, Novaya Gazeta wrote . The direct creators of the boarding school were Boris and Marina Khodorkovsky, the parents of Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

• In the first years of work, children were recruited into the boarding school by employees of the institution, General Yuri Mamonov and the ex-head of the special operations department of the Vympel detachment, Anatoly Ermolin, Novaya Gazeta wrote. Mamonov and Ermolin traveled to hot spots and looked for, as Mamonov put it, “the children of beaten people,” the publication said.
• Quote. “These were children from Kaspiysk, Volgodonsk, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Chechnya. The son of General [Vitaly] Gamov, who was burned alive in Vladivostok, studied here... The children of Nord-Ost, Beslan, and the children of the dead Vympel special forces soldiers later studied here.”
• Some of the children were brought to the boarding school by their parents—usually those who were assigned to Chechnya or served in remote parts of Russia, the publication said.
• Education at the lyceum is free, it is paid from the support fund.

This is not the first case of pressure on the boarding school. In October 2003, after the start of the criminal prosecution of Khodorkovsky, a search was carried out at the lyceum. In 2006, after the verdict against Khodorkovsky and Lebedev in the first Yukos case (issued in 2005), the property of the boarding school was seized . After this, protests took place in Moscow in defense of the lyceum.

• Three years later, in 2009, the tax service demanded that guardians of pupils, in particular Beslan orphans, pay 13% of the cost of education at the lyceum. The claims were later dropped .
• In November last year, the director of the boarding school, Karen Simonyan, at a parent meeting, announced attempts to “close the lyceum” through constant inspections. After this, the staff of the boarding school wrote an open letter asking Vladimir Putin to save the institution, noting in the text that 42 children from families of participants in the war in Ukraine are studying at the boarding school.