It is considering a complaint by Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s defence team.

On Thursday the two sides stated their cases before the Ingodinsky district court in Chita, concerning a complaint filed by the lawyers of former Yukos head Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

His defence team have lodged a complaint covering a wide range of issues about the actions (and inactivity) of the investigators from the Prosecutor General's office. For example, the complaint reflects the details of the “parallel” investigation that continued when, officially, investigative activities had been declared complete and at an end. Under cover of other investigations, the investigator on the case continued to gather evidence and periodically added it to the documentation of the Khodorkovsky-Lebedev case. The complaint also notes the “concealment from the defence by the investigators of evidence collected that refutes the accusations being made”. In this way material vital to the defence case (financial statements by Yukos, minutes of shareholders’ meetings, and so on) was not included in the documentation of the new criminal case against their client.

For more than two years Mikhail Khodorkovsky did not know what the new charges were. The second criminal case was initiated on 2 December 2004 but the first time Khodorkovsky was questioned as a suspect was not until 27 December 2006 — the day on which he was handed a copy of the official announcement that new criminal proceedings were under way. It was on 5 February 2007 that Mikhail Khodorkovsky was given the text of the new accusations. These had “nothing in common with the charges of which he had been earlier informed, nor did they form the grounds on which the criminal case had been initiated,” comments the lawyers’ complaint.

The covert nature of the investigation deprived Khodorkovsky of the chance of defending himself since it is impossible, for example, to demand that an investigator be disqualified and taken off the case if you do not know who that investigator is or the charges against you that he or she is investigating. It is not possible to offer explanations and testimony concerning the suspicions that the investigator has, if those same suspicions remain concealed for two years. In the complaint Khodorkovsky’s lawyer Boris Gruzd characterises this secretive investigation as “mediaeval”.

On 16 February 2007 Khodorkovsky was informed that the investigation into the new criminal case was completed. As a result “Mikhail Khodorkovsky was only able to exercise his lawful rights [under the Criminal-Procedural Code] to participate in the process for ten of the 806 days of the investigation, during which the evidence collected,” notes the complaint. During this entire period of covert investigation, emphasises Boris Gruzd, his client was treated “not as an equal partner with defined rights of his own but merely as an object of investigation.”

Half a page of the complaint is taken up with a list of the rights a suspect and his lawyers should enjoy once a judicial assessment has begun. In particular, the law permits Khodorkovsky to demand that an expert assessor be disqualified and allows him to put additional questions to that individual. Since there were only a few minutes between the appointment of the judicial assessor and the announcement of his conclusions, Khodorkovsky was deprived of this right. At noon on 28 December 2006, for example, Mikhail Khodorkovsky was presented with a court decree, instituting an informational-analytical and technical assessment. At 12.10 pm the same day he was already being acquainted with the findings of the court’s expert assessor. As his defence team has repeatedly noted in the past, the preliminary investigation supposedly being conducted in Chita has amounted, in practice, to no more than a process of acquainting Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev with the results of expert assessments carried out in Moscow.

The complaint, on which the Ingodinsky district court will rule this Friday in Chita, was first submitted by Boris Gruzd in Moscow to the Basmanny district court. On 24 January 2008, however, Judge Mushnikova transferred the complaint to the jurisdiction of the court in east Siberia. Her decision was taken in the absence of Boris Gruzd who was due to be in Chita seeing his client that day. His request that the hearing in Moscow be postponed so that he could attend was ignored.