To: Ingodinsky district court, Chita
From: Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky
STATEMENT
I consider that my rights during the preliminary investigation, including the right to know of what I stand accused and to present the evidence, have been consistently and intentionally violated in order to prevent me presenting objective information to the court about the events with which I am incriminated. My constitutional right to a defence has thereby also been violated.
The procedural aspects of these violations and juridical argumentation I leave to my defence lawyers. I would myself like to clarify what obstacles to the exercise of my rights and the assurance of objective trial are being created by the investigators.
1. Expert analysis
I am deprived of the opportunity to ensure that qualified experts are summoned and that they are asked normal questions, since the expert evaluation of the case has already been made without my participation. The court and myself are told a knowing falsehood when it is stated that these evaluations were carried out “on another case” which “does not relate to me”. As a consequence, I have not had the right to participate in the choice of specialists to carry out these evaluations.
In particular:
— part of the evaluations were entrusted to unqualified and untrustworthy individuals (petty cheats, to speak more simply) who are known to me by their analogous “output” in the first case [2003-5]. Despite our insistent demands, they did not then appear in court in order at least to attempt to explain their fantastic “methodology” and “conclusions”;
— In other expert evaluations the issues were formulated in such an illiterate fashion that any university student of economics would be shamed and excluded from the examination for such formulations. In posing such questions the investigators did not even try to understand what they were asking and the replies the experts gave them. They had a different aim: to create and strengthen the appearance of objectivity, of scientific accuracy even, of all those fantastic formulations of the prosecution that referred back to the “conclusions of experts”;
— The mistakes made in the calculations of these “experts” run into billions of dollars, of which I informed the investigators. These “experts”, it would seem, simply do not understand what they are counting: ask an ignorant question and you will receive an ignorant reply. Their conclusions contradict widely known facts because of the illiteracy of their questions and, in a number of cases, of the “expert methodologies”.
2. The physical evidence
My request that the primary (original) physical evidence be included in the case documentation and made available to me for familiarisation has been refused. I refer to the electronic databases of the companies within the Yukos group, which the investigators confiscated in their entirety and since have been concealed by them.
The investigators pick out individual agreements (roughly 1% of the total volume) and, referring to their essential elements but without penetrating their meaning, have drawn “conclusions” that 100% of the oil produced was stolen. The investigators have refused to let me see and present in court the rest of this evidence: it has been declared that the investigation is concluded, that it does not relate “to my case” and that there “is no time” left for me to see this evidence.
After which the investigators extended the period of my detention for another 11 months, continuing to manipulate the evidence without allowing access to these data bases.
3. Witnesses
The investigators are interrogating witnesses “in the other case”, without the knowledge of myself or my defence lawyers. They acquaint the witnesses and experts with materials of which I have no knowledge and in the authenticity of which I have no means of being assured, since they have been added to the documentation of “the other case” and not to mine.
Subsequently certain copies of the depositions made during such interrogations have been added to my case files but I have been denied the opportunity to put questions to the witnesses, to engage in face to face encounters with them, and to familiarise myself with the concealed documents which the witnesses were shown.
Since some of the witnesses are abroad they will not appear, evidently, in court. Consequently, the court will be deprived of the opportunity to understand and assess how the investigators “persuaded” these witnesses and what value their depositions have as evidence. Especially since the depositions of their interrogations have been selectively added from “the other case” (only those records that suit the purposes of the investigators) and, moreover, only in the form of copies.
4. Manipulation of the cases and the evidence
The head of the chief investigative department of the Investigative Committee at the RF Prosecutor General's office has declared that in one of the “other cases” there are about 3,000 volumes of documentation. In my case there are 168 volumes. I can only hazard a guess as to what documents unfamiliar to me may have been gathered in the “other cases”.
Since I began to familiarise myself with the materials of my case, which the investigators said had been completed, there have been three occasions when dozens of volumes of documentation, compiled under the “supervision//” of the investigators, have been added from “the other case”. I am aware of documents from those same “other cases” that support my arguments but they are, nevertheless, stubbornly concealed by the investigators who, in response to my insistent demands, reply that the assembled evidence is “sufficient for the prosecution”. In so doing the investigators “forget” that they are also obliged to prove an individual innocent if that is the case.
As the Supreme Court of Lichtenstein has already stated [25 April 2004], concerning the investigation of the Yukos cases, the investigators are not examining a crime, they are seeking out compromising materials. For my own part let me add: they are falsifying the evidence and all this is encouraged by the court’s failure to intervene.
8 July 2008