Moscow – Prosecutors filed new charges Monday against former oil baron Mikhail Khodorkovsky, now serving the fourth year of an eight-year prison term in Siberia. The relentless pursuit of the tycoon has showcased President Vladimir Putin’s highly successful campaign to tame Russia’s oligarchs using its politically pliant justice system.
Lawyers for Khodorkovsky called the new money-laundering charges an “insane” Kremlin bid to neutralize any remaining political threat ahead of crucial elections, casting it as a vengeful move to crush a man who challenged Putin’s policies and broke an unwritten rule against bringing his vast wealth to bear in the political arena.
Once Russia’s richest man and the chief of its largest oil producer, OAO Yukos, Khodorkovsky angered Putin’s Kremlin by funding opposition parties before 2003 parliamentary elections. He also questioned government policy on pipelines and foreign participation in the oil industry, running up against a government increasingly bent on restoring its control over Russia’s vast petroleum wealth.
The trial of the tycoon, arrested in October 2003, proceeded at the same time as a tax probe that put most of his blue-chip oil giant in state hands. Khodorkovsky was sentenced to eight years for fraud and tax evasion and shipped off to a prison camp near the Chinese border, where he has been out of the public eye but remained, for Putin’s critics, a symbol of Russian injustice. For Russia’s super rich, his punishment served a stark reminder not to cross the Kremlin.
Khodorkovsky would be eligible for parole in October, after serving half his term. With parliamentary elections slated for December and a March 2008 presidential vote – which Putin is barred by term limits from contesting – analysts said the president and those around him want to ensure Khodorkovsky remains behind bars.
For the Kremlin, “The main thing is that he doesn’t get out before 2008,” said Yuri Korgunyuk of the Indem think tank in Moscow.
Khodorkovsky could face up to 15 years for money laundering – a sentence that could keep him in prison well beyond the 2012 presidential vote.
Multiple sentences are most often served concurrently in Russia.
Before his arrest, Khodorkovsky was estimated by Forbes magazine to be the richest man in Russia with a fortune worth $15 billion.
