The second trial Yukos opens March 3 in Moscow. It offers the new Russian president an opportunity to break with the era of his predecessor. However, there is nothing to say if he is ready to forget the ways of Vladimir Putin.
The second trial is the first trial Yukos Yukos era Medvedev. It is also clear evidence that This era has still not begun, and we're still in the Putin era. Anyway, if things go like the first time, it is the youngest president to be tainted by this affair. And it promises to be interesting, this second trial. First, it takes place in Moscow, the court Khamovniki [name of a district of the capital], which means that the press will not have to go halfway around the world to account for [certain court hearings took place in Eastern Siberia].
For the prosecution, clearly, the ideal would be that the trial be held without witnesses, without lawyers and without media coverage. It would be easier to accuse the former CEO of Yukos, Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his former associate, Platon Lebedev, to have, between 1998 and 2003, eliminating 350 million tons of oil. According to official figures, Yukos and its three subsidiaries have extracted a total of 347 million tonnes of black gold during that famous period. That would mean they would have diverted all of their production, and even a little more. The money represents the amount stolen oil, from education, the profits of the company during this period.
But, in fact, with what they have paid for these years almost 17 billion dollars in taxes, an amount that the court has found insufficient, which has been the subject of the previous trial [in 2005] and the means to destroy Yukos? If I understand correctly, what is now accusing Khodorkovsky is in total contradiction with the verdict of the first trial: he would have stolen all the money earned between 1998 and 2003, when he was condemned for failing to pay all taxes. So, what rhyme eight years in prison he is serving? Intelligent people have told me that the power has now other concerns that Khodorkovsky, and he must first deal with the crisis. That was what I thought too. Indeed, this second trial is held in a country that has nothing to do with that first. At the time, oil prices went crazy, the power plays on velvet, people had jobs, incomes, they were happy with their leaders, and none of the ten largest oligarchs had been jailed . But fundamentally, perhaps, in the present serious situation, a new trial involving an oligarch is timely? As I recently told one of my colleagues, the power has always, at worst, a formula that has proven itself "Down with the oligarchs."
Yet, I feel that even a crowd eager for big show will be hard to understand why you fit a new show by repeating the same actors, who are already in custody and that you can not get anything. Russia is led by two lawyers [that is the university of Medvedev and Putin]. Putin, it is known approximately. But Medvedev? I have already said and I repeat, this is not "his business", yet it soon became the trial court of Khamovniki. I do not think Dmitri Medvedev has dreamed of this. But there it is. It will be held, among other things, what will happen during the second trial of Khodorkovsky and Lebedev, by the Russian elite and foreign. And even, to some extent, by a party of ordinary citizens, those who think and who for several months, have lost the reflex to manifest joy infant about every government decision. Whatever the real power structure, he tries to pretend it has two faces. With the court Khamovniki who reprises the role of the court of Basmanny [another district of Moscow, which had held the first trial], this illusion is shattered.
However, we can not repeat the mistake of Putin. This has led to a very large number of errors Related leading the country in the current siutation. Medvedev may still set its own priorities, preferring, for example, the right populism. He still has the choice, provided of course that this is actually he who writes the history of his presidency.
Natalia Guevorkian
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