[images
added by this website]
Khodorkovsky:
From billionaire to cage in court
Mikhail
Khodorkovsky, former chief
executive of Russia’s oil giant Yukos,
went on trial. (Xinhua/AFP
Photo)
BEIJING, June 27 (Xinhuanet) —
MOSCOW: Russian oil tycoon
Mikhail Khodorkovsky‘s US$1 billion fraud trial was adjourned on Wednesday in another false start to the country’s highest-profile prosecution since the 1991
fall of the former Soviet
Union.
The court will reconvene on July 12
after it accepted a defence petition for more time to review case documents, tribunal chairwoman Irina
Kolesnikova said.
Khodorkovsky, the main owner of oil major YUKOS, was brought handcuffed to a security guard from jail to the court, where he and co-defendant Platon
Lebedev were caged.
But the hearing was adjourned after less than two hours.
[Khodorkovsky]Procedural sparring means the court has yet to address the seven counts against
Khodorkovsky, 40, who faces 10 years in jail if convicted for his role in the 1994
privatisation of a fertilizer firm and tax evasion.
There is little doubt over the ultimate outcome, however, with even Khodorkovsky’s defence team predicting a guilty verdict in a prosecution case it has denounced as illegal.
The trial marks a reckoning for the
“oligarchs” who gained vast wealth and power in the helter-skelter privatisations of the 1990s while most Russians suffered a crushing slump in living standards.
Khodorkovsky, who denied the charges when his trial opened last Wednesday, became Russia’s richest man after snapping up YUKOS at a rock-bottom price under the
“loans for shares” privatisation scheme of the Boris Yeltsin era.
But some believe it was his support for the liberal opposition and refusal to defer to President Vladimir Putin
that led to his arrest last October and prosecution. Other plutocrats who stayed out of politics remained free.
Another court resumed hearings over when YUKOS must pay a US$3.4 billion back-tax claim which the company said could bankrupt it if a freeze on asset disposals remains in force.
Putin said last Thursday, however, that
YUKOS — one of Russia’s most profitable companies — should not be allowed to go bust.
Senior government officials said this week that talks had begun on a possible out-of-court settlement.
[Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev]Hopes of a negotiated deal have lifted YUKOS’s battered stock, but the company has still shed half of its value since before
Khodorkovsky’s arrest. It is now worth
US$24 billion.
Analysts say that rather than forcing
YUKOS to the wall, the Kremlin wants to exert pressure to force it to sell off choice assets – possibly to state-owned firms like Gazprom or oil company
Rosneft.
That would effectively neutralize
Khodorkovsky and his business empire well before Putin’s second and final term ends in 2008, making it easier to plan an orderly succession.
(China Daily)
Image above:
Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev
Copyright
©2004 Xinhua News
Agency.
… on
the, ahem, oligarchs
Our dossier on the life and troubled
times of the Russian
“oligarchs”
Website
dossier on the origins of
anti-Semitism