Vremya Novostei, Ekaterina Butorina, 2 July 2008

Mikhail Khodorkovsky responded yesterday to the charges issued against him on June 30 by the Prosecutor General's Office Investigation Committee (SKP). He said: "In the notification I have received regarding charges against me, the investigation repeats the absurd story to the effect that I was stealing all of Yukos’s oil output for six years." Essentially, these are the same charges that were formulated in February 2007 in the second Yukos case, alleging oil theft and money-laundering (450 billion rubles and $7.5 billion) between 1998 and 2004.

At the time, Khodorkovsky and his fellow executive and prisoner - former Menatep chief Platon Lebedev - were in a remand center in Chita, starting to study the materials for the criminal case against them. But during the presidential election campaing, the investigators suddenly found some new civil lawsuits, with plaintiffs requesting the addition of their compensation claims for damage allegedly done by the actions of the accused. For this reason, Khodorkovsky and Lebedev were interrupted in their reading of the materials and the investigation timeframe was extended; it has now ended with some charges that are both old and new. On June 30, lawyers said that the new version of the charges is the same as the old version: "There are no new incidents cited, the description of the defendant's actions remains unchanged, and the text of the last resolution, dated February 3, 2007, has hardly been changed at all."

The website of Khodorkovsky's defense press center posted transcripts yesterday of the statements made by Khodorkovsky and Lebedev regarding the SKP's charges against them. Khodorkovsky said that what the investigation is doing "indicates that the law enforcement agencies lack any confidence in the success of efforts to create an independent judicial system." Khodorkovsky maintains that the contents of the charges aren't fit to be considered by a court. "What the investigation calls 'legalization' consists of isolated examples taken from a large number of ordinary deals involving (temporary) placement of funds by the vertically-integrated Yukos oil company in Russian and international financial markets, along with the rest of the company's regular financial and economic activities, duly reflected in reports from individual companies and the consolidated reporting of Yukos.

Lebedev's statement was more categorical. In response to the charges against him, he alleged that the investigators themselves are criminals. "I request that my current statement should be regarded as a crime report," said Lebedev.