New charges of embezzlement and organized crime have been launched against the former richest man Mikhail Khodorkovsky in Russia, which already serving a sentence of eight years in prison in Siberia for fraud, said the attorney general's office Monday. A former opponent of Vladimir Putin is therefore likely not to find freedom in 2011 as planned.
The attorney general's office said in a statement that the prisoner when he headed the Russian oil giant Yukos had joined a group of investors to defraud a Siberian oil company of 3.6 billion rubles (about 80 million euros, 102 million) and other companies billions of rubles as well.
Arrested in 2003, Mikhail Khodorkovsky was sentenced in 2005 to eight years in prison for tax evasion and fraud. He was denied parole last August. His business partner Platon Lebedev was also sentenced to eight years in prison and is subject to the same new charges.
Defending Khodorkovsky condemned from the beginning a political trial for breaking the political ambitions of a powerful opponent of then President and current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. One lawyer, Yuri Schmidt, said that new charges had "no sense".
After the arrest of its CEO, Yukos has been dismantled, its main activities being taken up by a group controlled by the state.
0 comments:
Post a Comment