WATCHING THE WORLD: Khodorkovsky’s independence

July 7, 2008
Last week, just as millions of Americans—many of them in the oil and gas industry—were preparing for their July 4 Independence Day celebrations, the Russian government announced new charges against former OAO Yukos head Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his associate Platon Lebedev.

Last week, just as millions of Americans—many of them in the oil and gas industry—were preparing for their July 4 Independence Day celebrations, the Russian government announced new charges against former OAO Yukos head Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his associate Platon Lebedev.

As you may recall, Khodorkovsky was arrested in 2003 when his jet was stormed by armed police on a runway in Siberia, and he is now serving an 8-year sentence in eastern Russia.

Speculation has it that former Russian President Vladimir Putin used Khodorkovsky’s arrest and jailing as part of an effort to reassert state control over his country’s lucrative energy sector.

The “new” charges against Khodorkovsky and Lebedev include money laundering and “stealing almost 350 million tons of oil,” the investigative branch of the prosecutor’s office said.

The same absurdity

In reply, Khodorkovsky said, “The investigators have repeated the same absurdity about me stealing the entire Yukos oil output during 6 years.”

His lawyers described the charges as a slightly modified version of theft and money-laundering claims filed against him in February 2007 but never brought to trial.

Even Russia’s Kommersant newspaper saw through the charges. On July 1 the paper said: “Yesterday, Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev were charged with a theft of some 350 million tons of oil and laundering 487 billion roubles and $7.5 billion. You can hardly render this accusation new: Compared with the previous version, only stylistic inaccuracy has been improved, and some of the paragraphs have been swapped.”

One wonders when this farce will ever end. Some Russian observers have speculated that Putin’s successor, Dmitry Medvedev, could release Khodorkovsky to signal a break with some of his predecessor’s policies.

Medvedev=Putin

But any hope of that seemed to have faded in early June when Medvedev rejected any outside intervention over Khodorkovsky.

“Issues related to the serving of sentences should not become the subject of interstate negotiations,” said Medvedev during a visit to Berlin, his first trip to Europe since succeeding Putin earlier in May. The matter arose when a lawyer for Khodorkovsky called on Germany’s leader to raise his client’s case during talks with Medvedev.

“I hope that German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and the chancellor, Angela Merkel, plan to discuss this subject with Medvedev,” said Yury Schmidt, chief defense lawyer for Khodorkovsky.

Schmidt said he was more hopeful for his client’s release following talks he held with Steinmeier during the German minister’s visit to Russia in mid-May.

“Steinmeier asked me precise questions on legal procedures that would allow Khodorkovsky to be freed,” said Schmidt. “This is not a question of pardoning Khodorkovsky, but of legal avenues allowing him to be freed.”

Not much seems to have come of that meeting, though, apart from thinking that “Medvedev” is just another way of spelling “Putin.”

Some Independence Day celebration.