Text 2 Defiant Khodorkovsky denies all charges

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former head of the Russian oil firm Yukos, to­day said he was completely innocent of charges of tax evasion, fraud and misappropriation brought against him by the state.

“I do not consider myself guilty of a single charge that has been brought against me,” he said as cross examination began in the nine month- old trial.

Reading from a thick sheaf of notes, Mr. Khodorkovsky methodically responded to each of the prosecution’s accusations against him. He argued that he had not been responsible for the decision-making behind some of the alleged violations and that, in any case, there had been nothing wrong with Yukos’s actions under the laws that existed at the time.

He said prosecutors were making “deliberately false declarations every time he came to the end of his response to an accusation.

“The state prosecutor has not provided any evidence, but he tries to create it,” Mr. Khodorkovsky said, adding that he felt sorry for the prosecutor, Dmitry Shokhin, because “his role is to make a stand for the il­legal hypotheses of others.”

Yukos has been the target of a months long back-tax investigation that culminated in the sale of its main production facility, Yuganskneftegaz, against $28bn (€14.6 bn) in back-tax claims at a disputed auction in De­cember.

Critics of the Kremlin say the case is part of a government vendetta against Mr. Khodorkovsky after he funded opposition parties. Moscow in­sists the investigation is targeting a rotten business empire and its owners.

Mr. Khodorkovsky and his co-defendant, Platon Lebedev, stand accused of fraud in connection with the 1994 privatisation of a fertiliser company, Apatit. The prosecution says the pair illegally acquired a 20 % stake in the company, valued at $283 m.

“I always acted within the law,” Mr Khodorkovsky said. “I have given a detailed account of the circumstances of the acquisition of 20 % of Apatit, and said I consider the accusation that acquisition was fraudulent to be a deliberate lie.”

Yukos yesterday suffered a setback in its efforts to get a hearing in the US when a judge threw out its bankruptcy case and said the issue belonged in a forum that included the participation of the Russian government.

The ruling ended two months of legal attempts by Yukos to pull the US courts into its struggle with the Kremlin.

Describing the US court’s decision as “regrettable”, Yukos pointed out that the judge agreed with it on four of five issues, and said it had no doubt it had acted appropriately in bringing the matter to the US bank­ruptcy court.

“We must now consider all the options available to us and determine what our next steps will be,” Steven Theede, the Yukos chief executive, said in a statement.

The trial continues.

(the Guardian, by Mark Tran, February 25, 2005)

Text 3 Ирония судьбы

Накануне Нового года, 31 декабря, Петроградский федеральный суд Санкт-Петербурга преподнес подарок губернатору Ненецкого авто­номного округа (НАО) Владимиру Бутову, приговорив его к трем го­дам лишения свободы условно с испытательным сроком два года. Таким образом, впервые в России был осужден действующий губернатор. А днем ранее суд НАО отменил регистрацию Бутова в качестве кан­дидата в губернаторы. Выборы назначены на 23 января, и Бутов, бал­лотирующийся на третий срок, был лидером предвыборной гонки.

Глава НАО был наказан за избиение питерского постового ГИБД Д сержанта Алексея Попова. Однако ни потерпевший, ни его обидчики с выводами суда не согласились. Потерпевший вообще встал на сто­рону своих обидчиков, отказавшись от своих обвинительных пока­заний. Суд же установил, что Попов получил от Бутова и его коллег сотрясение мозга, гематомы на лице и ссадины на руках. Но ненец­кий губернатор уверял, что «честно, не бил» постового. («Известия»,11.01.2005)

Text 4

“We were victims too”

As part of our debate on the reform of the criminal justice system, Reg Dudley, who was convicted in 1977 of a horrific double murder, urges cau­tion on the Government in its drive to secure more convictions.

This week, more than 25 years after my friend Bob Maynard and I were sent to prison for two murders we didn’t commit, evidence of severe ir­regularities in the original investigation will finally be heard by the Court of Appeal. New expert testimony suggests that the main planks of the case against us, our supposed ‘confessions’, were fabricated — as we have claimed all along. The Crown’s star witness has also made a state­ment admitting perjury. In June 1992, The Observer published an inves­tigation into our case. More than a decade later, it looks as if the courts are finally catching up.

I am now 77. My marriage broke up long ago. I missed my children flourishing into adulthood; the childhoods of my grandchildren. I had to live with the label of being one of the notorious ‘torso murderers’, who had shot, decapitated and dismembered one man, and then brutally disposed of a second. Although the trial judge recommended we serve 15 years, Bob and I were ‘knocked back’ time and again by the Parole Board and Home Secretary — because we would not admit our guilt. Before I finally came out in 1998, I had done the rounds of Britain’s toughest jails: Dartmoor, Gartree, the Scrubs.

So forgive me if I sound cynical. When I hear politicians and police officers claiming that our criminal justice system needs reforming to make it easier to get convictions, that guilty man are going free and that victims are unprotected, I feel a need to interrupt. Hold on. Be careful. Bob and I are victims too. (The Observer, July 7, 2002)