Today Platon Lebedev’s defence again demanded she be replaced

On 18 March 2008 Platon Lebedev requested a second time that the official translator Anastasia Zuyeva be no longer employed on his case. Among her other errors she managed to translate the date “28 December 2000” ten different ways. If the first version (29 December 2000) bore some resemblance to reality, the last (38 December 2000) was quite beyond comprehension. However, on 21 March 2008 investigator V.N. Alyshev refused to accept the complaint.

Today Platon Lebedev’s defence team has submitted a complaint to Alexander Bastrykin, head of the Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor General's office, requiring that he override investigator Alyshev’s unlawful decree, immediately take measures to replace the incompetent translator and have all the materials from which Zuyeva made her “parody of a translation” again translated into Russian.

Among the “numerous, systematic and elementary” errors made by the translator only the most outrageous examples have been included in the present submission. In one case, for example, 368 000 000 roubles “became” 368 000 000 US dollars. “The defence finds it frightening to contemplate that Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev are being charged with crimes on the basis of such documents,” reads the present complaint.