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Oil tycoon to remain in prison until 2017
Source: Agencies |
December 31, 2010, Friday
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A RUSSIAN judge ordered former tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky jailed until 2017 yesterday after being convicted of theft and money-laundering.
Moscow judge Viktor Danilkin granted the prosecutors' sentencing request and ordered Khodorkovsky to serve 14 years in prison, including his current eight-year term and counting from the day of his arrest in October 2003.
With Khodorkovky and co-defendant Platon Lebedev watching from a glass-walled courtroom cage at the close of the trial, the judge said there was no way they could be reformed without "isolation from society."
Khodorkovsky, whose previous sentence was due to end next October, stood stunned as Danilkin announced the sentence, which his lawyers said was made under pressure from Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
"May God damn you and your descendants," Khodorkovsky's mother, Marina, shouted at the judge's back as he left the courtroom immediately after the sentencing.
Khodorkovsky had denied the charges.
Russia said the trial was a matter for its courts, adding that US suggestions the verdict resulted from selective justice were "groundless."
In a televised talk with Russians on December 16, Putin said Khodorkovsky had blood on his hands and that "a thief must be in jail," evoking US financial schemer Bernard Madoff to suggest a 150-year sentence would be fitting if allowed by law.
Khodorkovsky, once Russia's richest man and head of the now defunct Yukos, is in the final year of an eight-year sentence imposed after a fraud and tax evasion trial.
In the second trial, which lasted nearly two years, prosecutors said he and Lebedev stole nearly US$30 billion in oil from Yukos subsidiaries through price mechanisms and laundered money.
Khodorkovsky's lawyers dismissed the charges as a pretext to keep him in jail.
After Khodorkovsky's 2003 arrest, Yukos was bankrupted by back-tax claims and its top assets sold to the state.
Moscow judge Viktor Danilkin granted the prosecutors' sentencing request and ordered Khodorkovsky to serve 14 years in prison, including his current eight-year term and counting from the day of his arrest in October 2003.
With Khodorkovky and co-defendant Platon Lebedev watching from a glass-walled courtroom cage at the close of the trial, the judge said there was no way they could be reformed without "isolation from society."
Khodorkovsky, whose previous sentence was due to end next October, stood stunned as Danilkin announced the sentence, which his lawyers said was made under pressure from Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
"May God damn you and your descendants," Khodorkovsky's mother, Marina, shouted at the judge's back as he left the courtroom immediately after the sentencing.
Khodorkovsky had denied the charges.
Russia said the trial was a matter for its courts, adding that US suggestions the verdict resulted from selective justice were "groundless."
In a televised talk with Russians on December 16, Putin said Khodorkovsky had blood on his hands and that "a thief must be in jail," evoking US financial schemer Bernard Madoff to suggest a 150-year sentence would be fitting if allowed by law.
Khodorkovsky, once Russia's richest man and head of the now defunct Yukos, is in the final year of an eight-year sentence imposed after a fraud and tax evasion trial.
In the second trial, which lasted nearly two years, prosecutors said he and Lebedev stole nearly US$30 billion in oil from Yukos subsidiaries through price mechanisms and laundered money.
Khodorkovsky's lawyers dismissed the charges as a pretext to keep him in jail.
After Khodorkovsky's 2003 arrest, Yukos was bankrupted by back-tax claims and its top assets sold to the state.
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