• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Russia's Richest Man Spends Night in Jail

Posted on: Sunday, 26 October 2003, 06:00 CST

Billionaire oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, jailed on charges of fraud, forgery and tax evasion, spent his first night in custody in a notoriously overcrowded detention facility, the Interfax news agency reported Sunday.

Khodorkovsky, who heads the country's largest oil company Yukos and is regarded as Russia's richest man, was jailed Saturday after being seized by special forces at an airport in Siberia where his private jet had landed.

He was then taken to Moscow and interrogated and charged, in a dramatic escalation of a months-long probe of Yukos that the company and observers across the political spectrum say appears to be politically motivated. Khodorkovsky has funded two liberal opposition parties.

His lawyer Anton Drel said that a court late Saturday ordered Khodorkovsky to be held for up to two months in a pretrial detention facility, which Interfax identified as Moscow's troubled Matrosskaya Tishina.

Russia's shabby and crowded pretrial detention units are often regarded as worse than the prisons to which convicts are sent. Interfax cited Deputy Justice Minister Yuri Kalinin as saying that Matrosskaya Tishina currently has about 3,500 detainees in the facility built for 2,500.

"Still, this isn't terrible - last year there were 8,500 people held there," Kalinin was quoted as saying. He said Khodorkovsky was held in a cell with several other people, the report said.

The switchboard at Matrosskaya Tishina hung up on calls from The Associated Press, calls to the Justice Ministry were unanswered and the Yukos press office said it had no immediate comment.

The Prosecutor General's office said that Khodorkovsky was charged with fraud, forgery, embezzlement and personal and corporate tax evasion among other offenses.

Prosecutors said Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev, the chairman of the holding company that is Yukos' core shareholder, caused $1 billion of damage and harmed Russia state, according to news reports. Lebedev was arrested in July and remains in jail.

A statement from Yukos called the charges "absurd" and said the company "does not doubt for a moment that the entire investigation is politically motivated."

Even Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov, an opponent of the post-Soviet privatizations that brought vast wealth to Khodorkovsky and other so-called "oligarchs," alleged political intentions behind the probe.

"When Khodorkovsky didn't engage in anything other than business he was an ally to the powers that be, but as soon as he declared his political intentions he became an opponent and the present-day leadership doesn't stand on ceremony with its opponents," Interfax quoted him as saying.

Khodorkovsky, whose wealth was estimated by Forbes magazine at $8 billion, and other "oligarchs" are greatly resented by large numbers of Russians who did not benefit from the privatization of state property. Both parliamentary and presidential elections will be held in the coming months, and the standing of pro-Kremlin parties among ordinary Russians apparently has been strengthened by the pressure being put on oligarchs by the authorities.

The Yukos investigation began in July with the arrest of Lebedev on charges of theft of state property during the 1994 privatization of a fertilizer plant. Lebedev has remained in jail awaiting trial. This month, prosecutors also filed tax evasion charges against a high Yukos manager, Vasily Shakhnovsky.

More News in this Category