Mikhail Khodorkovsky's mother Marina had hoped that her son might be paroled this October. Now he faces a second set of charges.
Photo: Pavel Smertin
| Other Photos |
 |
|
 |
Khodorkovsky and Lebedev Charged Again
Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev, who have been sentenced to eight years' imprisonment, expressed themselves in the language of their cellmates as they were brought to court to face second prison terms. They are being held at the Chita investigative holding unit and were officially charged with embezzling over $23 billion from YUKOS production enterprises and laundering part of that money as philanthropic contributions to the nonprofit organization Open Russia. YUKOS lawyers claim that the same scheme to “optimize” taxation described by the prosecution was used legally by the state-controlled oil company Rosneft.
Provincial Chita has never seen anything like this before. Swarms of police closed streets and intersections leading to the regional persecutor's headquarters in the center of the city. Machinegun-bearing special forces troops in masks and helmets surrounded the building. In Khodorkovsky and Lebedev's opinion, all of that was done for them, but the press service of the Chita Department of Internal Affairs stated that “the measures to increase protection of public order have begun all of over the Siberian Federal District and were planned in advance and not connected with Khodorkovsky.”
The group of lawyers representing Khodorkovsky and Lebedev arrived at the prosecutor's headquarters at around 2:00, but the investigative action only began toward the end of the work day. First Lebedev and then Khodorkovsky were allowed by investigators to acquaint themselves with the massive resolution on charging them as defendants. According to the resolution, the two men were the organizers of the theft between 2001 and 2003 of oil worth about $23 billion from subsidiaries of the YUKOS oil company and the laundering of that money part of that money, some of it through the noncommercial organization Open Russia. According to the investigation, crude oil produced by subsidiaries Yuganskneftegaz, Samaraneftegaz and Tomskneft VNK was delivered on paper to companies registered in tax-benefit zones in Mordovia, Evenkia and other regions. Those firms sold the oil bought at “reduced prices” at market prices. It was done for the sake of reducing tax payments, as was recently acknowledged in a letter by Pavel Laptev, Russian Representative to the European Court of Human Rights, in a memorandum sent to that court. The Prosecutor General decided, however, that article 199 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (“Tax Evasion by a Legal Entity”) was too light for Khodorkovsky and Lebedev. Courts usually give suspended sentences and fines under that article.
Therefore, the resolution, signed by senior investigator for especially serious cases Salavat Karimov, applies the “heavy” article 160 of the Criminal Code (“Misappropriation of Entrusted Property,” punishable by up to 10 years' imprisonment) and the “super-heavy” article 174, note 1, part 4 (“Legalization of Funds Gained Criminally by an Organized Group,” punishable by 10 to 15 years' imprisonment).
The accused are not acknowledging guilt and refused to give evidence yesterday. Khodorkovsky said that the would not give evidence as long as he was being held in Chita, while the investigation itself is being conducted in Moscow. A spokesman for the Prosecutor General's Office told Kommersant, however, that no one is required to move Khodorkovsky and Lebedev to a Moscow holding facility. Investigators say that article 152 of the Criminal Procedure Code allows preliminary investigation to be conducted where the defendants are located and Khodorkovsky and Lebedev are serving their sentences in the Transbaikal and “the legality of his incarceration there has been established in court.”
Lawyer Pavel Ivlev, who earlier represented the interests of YUKOS, told Kommersant that a tax optimization scheme identical to the one the Prosecutor General is prosecuting the executives and shareholders of YUKOS for (including Ivlev, for whom an international arrest warrant has been issued) has been used by other companies, including Rosneft. According to the Rosneft consolidated report for the first quarter of 2006, and the Yuganskneftegaz report for 2005, Rosneft and its subsidiary OOO RN-Trade bought oil from Yuganskneftegaz for 3700 rubles per ton in 2005 and resold it for 5800 rubles per ton. Thus, Rosneft made a profit of more than 2000 rubles per ton on oil produced by Yuganskneftegaz, for a total of about 100 billion rubles in a year. The profit of Yuganskneftegaz before the payment of taxes was 36.6 billion rubles. It should be noted that, at that time, Rosneft owned only 77 percent of the authorized capital in Yuganskneftegaz, with the remainder still in YUKOS ownership. Thus, if investigator Karimov were to turn his attention to Rosneft, he would find, as he did in the case of YUKOS, that Rosneft in fact seized a large part of Yuganskneftegaz's profit, thus causing damage to YUKOS as a minority shareholder. Nikolay Manvelov told Kommersant yesterday that “We have always worked in accordance with Russian legislation.”
In Ivlev's opinion, it would be reasonably simple to prove in an unprejudiced court that there was no theft of oil from the subsidiary companies in the YUKOS case. The firms registered in the tax-benefit zones, which are called front companies in the investigation, did not receive oil from the YUKOS subsidiaries for free. They transferred money to Yuganskneftegaz, Samaraneftegaz and Tomskneft VNK for every delivery. Moreover, according to bookkeeping records from the three companies, they sometimes even made a profit on the deals with the “front” companies. When the Federal Tax Service discovered similar tax optimization schemes at TNK, Sibneft and LUKOIL, it limited its actions to recovering back taxes and fines, and the Prosecutor General did not characterize those actions as the theft of oil from their subsidiaries. According to Khodorkovsky's lawyer Yury Shmidt, the charges that client of stole oil worth more than $23 billion is “delusion simply because it is not possible for any to steal such a sum anywhere or anytime. It is more than the proceeds of the YUKOS Company.”
The Prosecution General's documents yesterday claim that, besides Khodorkovsky and Lebedev, the organizers of the group whose purpose was the theft of oil from the subsidiaries of YUKOS, include MENATEP shareholder Mikhail Brudno, who now lives in Israel and is wanted by Russia through Interpol. Former vice president of YUKOS Mikhail Elfimov, who signed the sales agreements to the “front” companies and then sold the oil for export in those companies' names, was also an active member of the group, according to investigators. An international arrest warrant has already been issued for Elfimov, although he is living legally in Latvia. The prosecutor has named general director of the “front” companies Fargoil and Ratibor Antonio Garcia-Valdez and Vladimir Malakhovsky and deputy director of the YUKOS directorate for foreign debt Vladimir Pereverzin as routine executors of the group. Pereverzin was also the head of the Cypriote company Ruthenhold Holding Limited, to which YUKOS exported oil. Malakhovsky and Pereverzin have been in custody for over a year and the sentence against them will be read by a judge of the Basmanny Court in Moscow within the next few days. The prosecutor demanded sentences of 11 years each for them after third defendant Garcia-Valdez escaped custody.
There is one last routine executor of the group. That is general director of the “front” OOO Ratmir, Vladislav Kartashov, who has been living in Cyprus for more than two years and who is now waiting for the decision of a court in Nicosia on the extradition to Russia. Curiously, one of the documents in Kartashov's defense in the case is the decision of the Moscow Arbitration Court indicating that the only purpose of the deals made by the firm he headed and the other “front” companies was evasion of tax payments by the legal entity YUKOS, a crime for which an employee of a regular company is Russia would most likely receive a suspended sentence.
Ekaterina Zapodinskaya
All the Article in Russian as of Feb. 06, 2007
|
|
|
