Karimov is pushed into retirement

Yekaterina Zadonskaya, Kommersant Daily, 17.09.2007

Yesterday it became known that Salavat Karimov has requested early retirement. The senior investigator for particularly important cases at the Prosecutor General’s office, Karimov led the inquiry into two criminal cases drawn up against Mikhail Khodorkovsky. The head of the investigative committee of the Prosecutor General’s office, Alexander Bastrykin, did not invite Karimov to join his team. Prosecutor-General Yury Chaika offered alternative employment but Karimov turned it down as incompatible with his level of experience.

It was a week ago that Salavat Karimov learned he would not be joining the investigative committee of the Prosecutor General’s office. As he told his colleagues, not one of the committee’s officials had explained why he was not being transferred to work there. Instead he was simply instructed to hadn over the 127 volumes of the case he had built up against Khodorkovsky over the past nine months.

Sources within the Prosecutor General’s office told us that when Mr Karimov went to the personnel department at the office on Bolshaya Dmitrovka Street they told him that Yury Chaika was offering to make him his adviser. Karimov decided, however, that it would be better to retire and submitted the appropriate documentation.

[…] As for the team of investigators that Karimov put together from all over Russia to work on the cases against Khodorkovsky and Lebedev, they continue to co-operate with the investigative committee, familiarising its officials with the materials and sewing together the volumes to be sent to court.

Of the team who began the investigation only Karimov and investigator Ibiyev from the North Caucasus are no longer there.