The team of investigators has suffered losses; Khodorkovsky and Lebedev’s case is now in the hands of the Prosecutor General’s own investigations committee.

Yekaterina Zapondinskya, Kommersant Daily, 11.09.2007

Yesterday it became known that the senior investigator for particularly important cases at the Prosecutor General’s office, Salavat Karimov, has been moved to other work. Karimov led the investigation of both criminal cases brought against Mikhail Khodorkovsky until the present. Alexander Bastrykin, chairman of the Prosecutor General’s investigative committee, has not given Karimov a job in his department. Two other active participants of the criminal cases brought against Yukos also today find themselves out of a job.

[…] Khodorkovsky’s lawyer Yury Schmidt yesterday confirmed this news and told our paper that the head of the team investigating his client’s case is now Alexander Drymanov: “All I know about him is that he was responsible for bringing the charges against Alexander Barinov, former governor of the [Far Northern] Nenets Region,” said Schmidt. “Recently Barinov was acquitted on 13 counts and is today a free man, having been given a suspended sentence for the fourteenth charge against him.” Schmidt declined to comment on Karimov’s dismissal. “My colleagues have differing views on the subject. Neither has Mikhail Khodorkovsky so far given any response.”

Investigators who worked with Karimov in the Prosecutor General’s office believe he fell victim to the “excessively politicised” nature of the Yukos case, as a result of which he became close to Igor Sechin, head of the presidential staff. Meanwhile Alexander Bastrykin, Putin’s fellow student from their days at the Leningrad University law faculty, is evidently determined to show his independence. As a result not only Karimov failed to get a job with Bastrykin’s committee: two more investigators who earned a name for themselves during the Yukos case have also lost their jobs. One is Nikolai Atmonyev, until recently the deputy head of the department for investigation of particularly important cases. He was in charge of investigating the allegations of fraud committed at Yukos after Khodorkovsky had been arrested. Mikhail Bezugly, Karimov’s right hand man from the very first case against Yukov, is the other. During 2003 it was Bezugly who cross-examined the head of Yukos-Moscow, US citizen Steven Tidy, who subsequently was banned from entering Russia and became the subject of an arrest warrant.