Jailed former oil tycoon accuses Russian prosecutors of withholding exonerating evidence

Jailed Russian tycoon says state hiding evidence

MOSCOW — Speaking Monday from his courtroom cage, former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky accused Russian prosecutors of withholding evidence exonerating him of new charges that could keep him in prison for decades.

Khodorkovsky, once Russia’s richest man, is charged with embezzling more than $25 billion worth of oil from subsidiaries of his former oil company, Yukos, and laundering most of the proceeds.

He is serving an eight-year sentence for a 2005 fraud and tax evasion conviction. The cases are seen as part of both a Kremlin push to punish Khodorkovsky for challenging then-President Vladimir Putin and an effort to strengthen the state’s grip on energy resources.

Khodorkovsky and his business partner, Platon Lebedev, who is also serving eight years on the same charges, face up to 22 more years in prison if convicted in the new trial. Both deny the charges.

As the prosecution called its first witness in the trial Monday, Khodorkovsky accused prosecutors of hiding documents that prove the oil was legally transferred. He said his defense hinges on external audits and customs declarations that show the oil in question was delivered to a state pipeline company.

“This naturally excludes the possibility of theft,” Khodorkovsky said. Other than those documents, he said, “I don’t need anything else whatsoever to defend myself.”

Khodorkovsky’s lawyers say many of the documents were used as evidence against him in his first trial, and without them there is no sense in continuing the second trial.

“If our defendants had nothing to do with the theft … of oil produced by Yukos, which follows from the documented evidence, then the words (of witnesses) can hardly be more significant than the documents,” said defense lawyer Vladimir Krasnov.

State prosecutor Valery Lakhtin said he was not withholding documents. He said only that other evidence would be introduced later in the trial.

Judge Viktor Danilkin refused a defense motion to suspend the case until the documents are produced, but promised to send a request to the Prosecutor General’s office that they be presented.

Khodorkovsky and Lebedev wore casual clothes and their customary cool, smiling at times or yawning. Riot police turned their heads to eavesdrop on whispered exchanges with defense lawyers.

A few supporters gathered outside the court holding a banner with a picture of Khodorkovsky and bearing the slogan “One for All.”

Khodorkovsky’s second trial has been seen as a test of whether Russia’s justice system has changed under President Dmitry Medvedev. A lawyer by education, Medvedev said at his 2008 inauguration that judicial reform and the rule of law were among his priorities.

Over the six-month duration of the latest trial, the court has rejected dozens of defense motions for the case to be thrown out or sent back to prosecutors for reworking.