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YUKOS Philanthropy in Court
// Lawyers’ pay case will be heard in Tula
The case of the embezzlement of 217 million rubles from YUKOS has been submitted to the Privokzalny Court in Tula. According to the Prosecutor General’s Office, it uncovered a criminal scheme by the defenders of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev to receive payment. The defendants consider the prosecution’s conclusions nonsensical and call the case the latest attempt pressure the defense of the convicted former YUKOS shareholders.
Deputy Prosecutor General Viktor Grin approved the charges in the criminal case against the directors of the Tula companies OOO Gonkar Yury Volkov) and OOO Audentsia Secretarial Pool (Anna Tuchkina) and the chairman of the board of the RUSO automobile club Vladimir Sorochinsky. They are accused of “embezzlement by an organized group with the use of professional status” and “laundering and legalizing monetary funds obtained by criminal means.”
An investigation determined that the defendants, acting as a group with Mikhail Trushin, vice president of OOO YUKOS Moscow for whom there is now an international arrest warrant in effect, and Alexey Kurtsin, OOO YUKOS Moscow business manager, created a scheme to embezzle and turn into cash YUKOS monetary funds between January and July 2004.
For those purposes, investigators say, the accused found philanthropic organizations active in Russia or founded new ones and appointed their subordinates to leadership positions in them. Then those organizations sent letters to YUKOS asking for donation of 12 million to 40 million rubles. After the money was transferred to the Tula bank accounts of the organizations, it was further distributed among front companies, after which it was turned into cash. According to the investigation, 217 million rubles was embezzled from YUKOS using that simple scheme.
The case was initiated in 2004, after entrepreneurs Volkov and Tuchkin were questioned as witnesses. The companies they headed belonged to a YUKOS partner, Igor Goncharov. In November 2005, Goncharov was sentenced by the Lefortovo District Court to 13 years in a high-security prison colony and fined 1 million rubles for participating in the embezzlement and laundering of 342 million rubles of YUKOS money. Volkov and Tuchkina told investigators that they bought public organizations throughout the country in 2004 on the instructions of their bosses. They also explained the scheme for cashing out the funds in detail. Their testimony laid the base for the case. The third defendant, well-known racecar driver Vladimir Sorochinsky, approached YUKOS on March 5, 2004, with a request for 20 million rubles for his RUSO car club. After receiving the sum requested, he transferred the money to OOO Metall-Impress, controlled by Goncharov, which turned it into cash. Kurtsin, the business manager of YUKOS Moscow, has already been sentenced 14 years’ imprisonment and the payment of a 1-million rubles fine. YUKOS Moscow vice president Trushin, whom the prosecutor calls the organizer of the scheme, fled to London in 2004 and is not accessible to investigators.
The most interesting detail of the case is that, according to investigators, the money embezzled through the philanthropic organizations was later used to pay Khodorkovsky and Lebedev’s lawyers.
Lawyer Evgeny Baru, who represented Lebedev, found out about the Tula case from Kommersant, but considered it predictable. “The Prosecutor General’s Office never hid its intentions of silencing and discrediting Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev’s lawyers, who continually bothered them with procedural violations, inconsistencies in the accusations and so on,” Baru said. “There are plenty of opportunities to go after us. Obviously, the investigators will try to form a criminal lawyers’ syndicate on the basis of the Tula case.” Baru called the use of schemes to pay the lawyers ridiculous. “We all understand what kind of case we are taking part in, so who would even think of that? It’s from the field of fabrication and fantasy.”
Vladislav Trifonov
All the Article in Russian as of Aug. 19, 2008
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