The Prosecutor General’s office was allowed to stick to its strategy of splitting up the Yukos case. On June 26, the Basmanny court dismissed M. Khodorkovsky’s defence’s appeal against the separation of the criminal case from the other one.

On June 12, Khodorkovsky’s lawyer, Yuri Schmidt, filed an appeal to the Basmanny court against the order of investigator Karimov on the separation from the extensive Yukos case (¹18/41-03) aimed directly at Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Platon Lebedev and the group of unidentified persons (they were all accused in accordance with article 174-1 of the legislation).

Schmidt points out that the investigator’s order cannot be considered legal, well-founded and substantiated because “it is possible to separate one case from the other” with respect to “other people suspected or accused of committing crimes not related to the actions charged in the criminal case being investigated”. And, it is impossible to establish a credible “lack of relations” between unidentified persons and some other actions.

In addition, Schmidt stressed that in accordance with article 12 of the Penal Code of the Russian Federation, citizens of the Russian Federation that commit a crime outside the country’s frontiers (the investigation believes that legalisation of the stolen funds was conducted overseas) are subject to criminal liability as stipulated in the code, if the deed they commit is found to be a crime in the state or territory where it was committed. However, the order of investigator Karimov does not contain the information that the deeds described by investigators from the Russian Prosecutor General’s office are found to be crimes relating to money laundering in accordance with the legislation of the foreign state.