Leonid Nevzlin Arrives in American with a Bang
// Former YUKOS co-owner goes on vacation
Interfax news agency reported yesterday that former YUKOS co-owner Leonid Nevzlin was taken into custody in the United States. Russian Interpol, that report stated, had informed U.S. authorities of his presence. Nevzlin himself told Kommersant, however, that he had had no problems with his trip to America. Migration authorities simply informed their Russian colleagues of his presence in the country.
According to the Russian Interfax agency, the U.S. border control service temporarily held Nevzlin when he filed an application to enter the country. “He was held on the basis of a circular received earlier about the search and arrest of Mr. Nevzlin,” an anonymous source told Interfax in Moscow, noting that American authorities had asked the Russians to confirm the fact that charges has been filed against the former co-owner of YUKOS and that there was an international warrant for his arrest, and that such a telegram was received from the United States by the Russian bureau of Interpol.
The U.S. State Department refused to comment yesterday on information that Nevzlin had been taken into custody at the request of Russian authorities, saying that it does nit release information on private individuals. Nonetheless, a Kommersant source close to the U.S. Justice Department stated that he had no information on the detainment of Nevzlin at Newark International Airport. “It's possible that someone in Moscow made a mistake,” he said. The Russian Prosecutor General's Office also declined to comment on reports of Nevzlin's arrest.
Nevzlin himself told Kommersant that the plane carrying him and his family landed at Newark Airport in New Jersey on December 24. “I received no additional attention at passport control,” he said. “I passed through all the formalities in 15-20 minutes and then went here and there.”
Nevzlin suggested that the Interfax report was not a mistake but a provocation to apply pressure to Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev, who are expected to face additional charges in the coming days.
“Russian authorities created that false alarm to show Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev that the supervisor of the laundering of YUKOS money was arrested in the U.S.,” Nevzlin speculated. But he claimed that he had no illegally gained funds. “What I earned was paltry in comparison to what the Russian leadership put in its own pocket. In their place, I would be ashamed chase after my kopecks,” he said.
Nevzlin's Russian lawyer Dmitry Kharitonov told Kommersant that information about the arrival in the U.S. of a person who is wanted in Russia could be given to Russian authorities. Kharitonov urged that the situation not be dramatized and recalled that Nevzlin visited the U.S. in the summer of 2005 and even appeared at a session of the U.S. Congress Helsinki Committee, where he severely criticized Russian authorities. Kharitonov said that Moscow demanded his extradition at that time, and was refused.
Kharitonov said that the criminal case against Nevzlin is still be investigated. “They send me papers from time to time, documents on the extension of the investigation. Nothing else is happening. I don't know how it will end, since there is nothing to investigate. There is no proof of Nevzlin's guilt and there never was.” In the summer of 2004, the Prosecutor General's Office accused Nevzlin in absentia of organizing an attempt on the lives of former head of the business department of ZAO Rosprom Sergey Kolesov, former head of public relations for the Moscow mayor's office Olga Kostina and Sergey Rybin, an executive of the Austrian oil company East Petroleum Handelsges. The prosecutor alleges that those crimes, along with the murders of Olga and Sergey Gorin, were committed by Nevzlin along with former YUKOS security service employees Alexey Pichugin, who has been sentenced to 24 years in maximum-security confinement.
Dmitry Sidorov, Washington; Marina Lepina
All the Article in Russian as of Dec. 27, 2006
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