Russia has transferred oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky to Moscow from his Siberian prison, officials said Tuesday, ahead of a new trial supporters fear is aimed at keeping him in jail indefinitely. Khodorkovsky, once Russia's richest man, has been held in a prison in the remote far-eastern region of Chita since his condemnation in 2005 on charges of fraud and tax evasion in a case that generated international controversy.
"The Khamovniki court in Moscow has been informed about Khodorkovsky's transfer to Moscow," Moscow court spokeswoman Anna Usacheva told AFP. The Interfax news agency quoted a security source as saying Khodorkovsky was now in Moscow's Matrosskaya Tishina (Sailor's Rest) prison, the same detention centre where he was held before his first trial. His friend and former business associate Platon Lebedev had also been taken back to Moscow for the trial, Usacheva added.
The trial, due to begin on March 3, is to examine charges that the pair between 1998 and 2003 carried out illegal transactions worth 896 billion rubles (25 billion dollars at current exchange rates). Khodorkovsky was arrested at gunpoint in 2003 and his Yukos oil company - once a favourite of investors for its transparency - was gradually dismantled after being hit with massive back-tax claims. Since his conviction, he has been serving an eight-year sentence along with Lebedev in the remote region of Chita, in the far east of Russia.
Lebedev is the former boss of Menatep holding group, which was the main shareholder in Yukos. Adding to his legal woes, a separate lawsuit against Khodorkovsky is due to be heard on Wednesday at Moscow's Meshchansky court on allegations that he sexually assaulted a former cellmate. Alexander Kuchma, who slashed the tycoon's face in 2006, claims in the lawsuit that the lawsuit was revenge for being sexually assaulted.
But Denis Yurinsky, an ex-prisoner who supervised Khodorkovsky in the jail sewing workshop went public Tuesday to say that the allegations were "complete nonsense." "I am convinced ... that Kuchma was simply put up to write this statement, so it would help smear (Khodorkovsky's) parole application," Yurinsky told Kommersant-Vlast magazine. The new trial means that Khodorkovksy risks an additional prison sentence that could rule out any possibility of him being released in the near future.
Some had suggested that President Dmitry Medvedev might grant Khodorkovsky a pardon upon entering office in May 2008 as a signal that he was serious about fulfilling campaign promises to end what he had called Russia's "judicial nihilism". But in August, a court rejected a request from Khodorkovsky for parole, citing a refusal to take part in a prison training programme. Russia has insisted it is dealing with Khodorkovsky fairly and that he committed financial fraud on a massive scale, starting in the 1990s when he acquired billions of dollars worth of assets in privatisation deals.
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