Yukos News Online

Rights court upholds censure of Russia over Khodorkovsky

Agence France Presse

14 December 2011

The European Court of Human Rights on Wednesday confirmed its decision to censure Russia over its treatment of jailed tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky and rejected an appeal application.

In may the Strasbourg-based rights court ordered Russia to pay about 24,500 euros in costs and damages to the tycoon, once Russia's richest man but now serving sentences for tax evasion and fraud.

However, the court rejected Khodorkovsky's central argument that his case is politically motivated due to his opposition to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

Russia appealed the original decision but the court's ruling is now definitive.

The case was thus included Wednesday on the court's "Requests for referral rejected" list.

Time to increase pressure on Putin

Washington Post Blog

13 December 2011

Tomorrow in the European Affairs Subcommittee of the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, a number of activists will testify on Russian human rights abuses and pending legislation that would bar them from entering the U.S. Those testifying include The Post’s Robert Kagan (from the Brookings Institute), David Kramer of Freedom House, and Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch. In advance of the hearing, a group of human rights activists sent an open letter to the subcommittee which reads in part:

We are writing to encourage action to address widespread and egregious violations of human rights in the Russian Federation contrary to international commitments. For too long, there has been a culture of impunity for Russian officials involved in human rights violations. Many of these cases – such as the death of Sergei Magnitsky, an attorney investigating official corruption, and the trials and incarceration of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a successful businessman and regime critic – are well known outside of Russia. Many others are not. We raise our voices on behalf of all Russians who have suffered serious human rights abuses by the government.

The Russian Federation is a party to a number of international agreements which require the government to adhere to international standards in safeguarding the human rights of it citizens. Monitoring compliance with such agreements is not simply an internal matter for the Russia government; it is a legitimate concern for all who care about the rule of law and human rights. Sadly, the current government in Russia has manifestly failed in its international obligations to respect the rights of its citizens. As The Washington Post recently editorialized, “Despite many promises, Mr. Putin and Mr. Medvedev have done nothing to rein in the endemic lawlessness of their regime.”

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Other outspoken Russian oligarchs have fared poorly

FEATURE

13 December 2011

CNN

The careers of Russian oligarchs who have sought to wield power against the Kremlin in the media or politics have not tended to go far.

Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, an oil magnate who backed an opposition party, has been in jail since 2003 and was convicted in 2005 on charges of tax evasion and fraud.

Vladimir A. Gusinsky and Boris A. Berezovsky, both of whom owned media outlets that were critical of the government, fled the country.

During the 1990s, it was common for oligarchs to oppose the Kremlin, said Henry Hale, director of the Institute for Europe, Russian and Eurasian Studies at George Washington University.

But once Vladimir Putin became president in 2000, "He started making examples of high-profile business people/oligarchs," Hale said.

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Nets Owner,Tycoon Prokhorov To Run For Russian President

Dow Jones International News 

12 December 2011

Russian billionaire tycoon and Nets basketball team owner Mikhail Prokhorov Monday said he'll run against Vladimir Putin in next year's presidential election.

Prokhorov's announcement to a room full of journalists came eight days after Russia's parliamentary election, whose results have been criticized and led to widespread protests. In September, Prokhorov gave up his bid to lead a pro-business Just Cause party in the parliamentary poll and accused the Kremlin of trying to turn him into a "puppet."

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When asked if he feared sharing the fate of former Yukos Oil Co. chief Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who has seen his company broken up and is currently serving prison time upon challenging Putin, Prokhorov said: "I did not do anything illegal, and have nothing to be afraid of." Prokhorov, who owns stakes in OAO Polyus Gold (PLZL.RS) and United Co. Rusal PLC (0486.HK) said there is no basis for denying parole to Khodorkovsky.

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Billionaire Prokhorov to Challenge Putin

Bloomberg

12 December 2011

Billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov said he’ll run for president against Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in March elections after the biggest anti-government demonstrations in a decade emboldened Russia’s opposition.

“This is the most important decision of my life,” the New Jersey Nets basketball team owner told reporters in Moscow.

Prokhorov, Russia’s third-richest man with a fortune Forbes magazine put at $18 billion, said that he’ll seek to build support from the grassroots level and that he opposes “revolution” and “populism.” Prokhorov, 46, quit as leader of the Pravoye Delo, or Right Cause, party on Sept. 15, accusing President Dmitry Medvedev’s administration of blocking the group’s preparations for parliamentary elections in December.

That Dec. 4 vote, in which Putin and Medvedev’s United Russia party retained its majority, was neither free nor fair, observers from the U.S. and Europe said. Thousands of Russians took to the streets in the week after the contest to protest the results amid widespread reports of ballot-stuffing. Police estimated the crowd at Moscow’s Dec. 10 rally, the largest in the country, at 25,000, the same figure they ascribed to a pro- United Russia rally near Red Square today. 

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Khodorkovsky

Prokhorov said both Putin and Medvedev declined to meet with him to discuss his presidential bid and that he’ll spend 10 percent of his campaign criticizing Putin and the rest laying out his proposals. He also said he isn’t afraid of suffering the fate of jailed former Yukos Oil Co. billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

Khodorkovsky was Russia’s richest man when he was arrested at gunpoint on the tarmac of a Siberian airport in October 2003. He was sentenced to a total of 13 years in two separate convictions for fraud, tax evasion and oil embezzlement as Yukos was dismantled and sold at auction to cover more than $30 billion in back taxes. Khodorkovsky, who denies any guilt, says he was targeted by Putin for financing opposition parties.

Prokhorov’s presidential run is “a special Putin project that aims to simulate a Mikhail Khodorkovsky in the election” and give the illusion of democracy, said Alexei Mukhin, head of the Moscow-based Center for Political Information.

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Russian Opposition Steps into the Light

by Pavel Khodorkovsky

World Policy Blog

11 December 2011

Vladimir Putin should give the Russian opposition some credit.

Over the last week and a half, hundreds of demonstrations have erupted in Russian cities on the heels of an unabashedly manipulated parliamentary election December 4. But on Thursday, Putin chose to zero in on comments made by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton following the vote, saying her comments about an “unfair” election “set the tone for some actors in our country and gave them a signal” to protest.

While it is true that the Russian opposition is buoyed by support from Clinton and leaders of other democratic nations, what we are seeing in Russia is a homegrown movement, led by individuals who have risen to prominence not by falsifying voting results but by creating a vision for the future based on the fair elections and the rule of law.

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Russian Election Fallout, Protests Shake Old Certainty, Spook Markets

The Wall Street Journal

10 December 2011

The stability of Vladimir Putin's government was once the keystone of Russia's investment model. Buffeted by volatile oil prices and capricious international sources of funding, the financial community could always point to what appeared to be permanent support for the country's leaders, as well as to low levels of sovereign debt.

Fear gripped the market again on Friday as investors sold on the eve of what may be Russia's largest demonstration in years near the Kremlin on Saturday. The RTS slipped 4.3% Friday, compared with a 2% drop for the MSCI Emerging Markets Index and little movement in Brent crude-oil prices. The ruble dropped against the dollar and the euro.

Politics hasn't weighed on the Russian market this much since the arrest and trial of Yukos Oil Co. founder Mikhail Khodorkovsky, investors said.

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The long life of Homo sovieticus

FEATURE

The Economist

9 December 2011

Image: The Economist 9th December 2011 

Twenty years to the month since the Soviet Union fell apart, crowds of angry young people have taken to the streets of Moscow, protesting against the ruling United Russia Party (“the party of crooks and thieves”) and chanting “Russia without Putin!” Hundreds have been detained, and the army has been brought into the centre of Moscow “to provide security”. Although the numbers are a far cry from the half-million who thronged the streets to bury the USSR, these were the biggest protests in recent years. The immediate trigger for this crisis was the rigging of the parliamentary elections on December 4th. But the causes lie far deeper.

The ruling regime started to lose its legitimacy just as Vladimir Putin, Russia’s prime minister, declared a final victory for “stability”, promised to return to the Kremlin as president and pledged to rebuild a Eurasian Union with former Soviet republics. The Soviet flavour of all this had been underscored at United Russia’s party congress at the end of November, where Mr Putin was nominated for the presidency. “We need a strong, brave and able leader …And we have such a man: it is Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin,” enthused a film director. A steelworker told the congress how Mr Putin had “lifted our factory from its knees” and supported it “with his wise advice”. A single mother with 19 children thanked Mr Putin for a “bright future”.

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Stories of bureaucrats, and especially the security services, putting pressure on businesses are now common. The most famous example is that of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the dismembering of the Yukos oil company. But there are thousands of others. The statistics are staggering: one in six businessmen in Russia has been prosecuted for an alleged economic crime over the past decade. Most of the cases have no plaintiff and the number of acquittals is close to zero, according to studies by Russia’s Centre of Legal and Economic Research. This means that the vast number of Russian businessmen in jail are victims of corrupt prosecutors, police and courts, which can expropriate a business with impunity.

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Making the Case Against the Kremlin

FEATURE

The New York Review of Books

6 December 2011

No one expected Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s dominant United Russia party to do as well in Sunday’s parliamentary elections as it has in the past. Indeed, the Kremlin was so nervous about United Russia losing seats in the Duma that it unleashed its prosecutors on the respected Russian independent vote-monitoring organization Golos (it was fined $1000 a few days ago for procedural violations), and Western election observers now say the vote was “neither free nor fair.” Even so, the extent of United Russia’s decline is startling: it drew slightly less than 50 percent on Sunday, down from the more than 64 percent of the vote it got in 2007.
There are many reasons for the growing disillusionment with Putinism, among them the way Putin announced earlier this fall that current president Dmitry Medvedev would step aside in the March 2012 presidential elections so that he could run largely unopposed. But there also seems to be an increasing sense among Russian voters that the Kremlin has done nothing to stop pervasive corruption and that its own behavior is often above the law. To understand the extent of the problem, observers might do well to watch German filmmaker Cyril Tuschi’s provocative new documentary about jailed Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, which began showing in Russia and the United States just days before the election and is now at New York’s Film Forum.
In its portrait of the protagonist and his prosecution and imprisonment in 2003, Khodorkovsky is a stark reminder of the capricious ways in which the Russian leadership has enriched itself at the expense of ordinary Russians; it is also a revealing expose of the way the Kremlin has continually bent the legal system to serve its purposes. Tuschi told me in an interview that the timing of the film’s release in Russia, on the eve of the Duma vote, was coincidental. (He had originally conceived of the film as a fictional drama about the conflict between Khodorkovsky and Putin.) But the Kremlin apparently saw things differently. Although several major cinemas in Russia initially agreed to show “Khodorkovsky,” many later backed out, reportedly because of pressure from Russian authorities.
One can easily see why the Kremlin wants to limit the screening of the film. The most interesting part deals with Khodorkovsky’s relations with Putin and the falling out that seems to have precipitated his arrest. As head of the oil giant Yukos and one of the country’s biggest taxpayers, Khodorkovsky met regularly with Putin after Putin became president in 2000. The two men reportedly got on well—until Khodorkovsky violated Putin’s golden rule for the oligarchs: stay out of politics. With elections to the Duma approaching in December 2003, Khodorkovsky apparently decided that the political system needed reinvigorating and began funding opposition political parties.

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Film's Focus on a Flawed Russian Figure Brings Ire With Putin Into View

The New York Times

4 December 2011

''Khodorkovsky,'' a German filmmaker's documentary on the saga of the jailed former oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who for some has become a symbol of opposition to Vladimir V. Putin, made its official premiere in Moscow on Friday, in a theater just blocks from the Kremlin and just two days before parliamentary elections that are expected to hurt Mr. Putin's party. The screening was part of a long-scheduled documentary film festival. Obstacles that hindered the film's wider release in Russia seemed to underscore the apparent jitters of the ruling elite and the growing cracks in Mr. Putin's once infallible image: As the elections approached, movie theaters that had been planning to show the film began pulling out en masse, without citing reasons. At the ArtDocFest at the Khudozhestvenny movie theater near the Kremlin on Friday night, an audience of several hundred Russian intelligentsia laughed at documentary footage of Mr. Putin chastising Mr. Khodorkovsky during a meeting with Russian billionaires in the Kremlin in 2003. They applauded after Yevgeny Saburov, a former minister in President Boris Yeltin's government, described Mr. Putin's actions as the vendetta of a ''petty man'' who can't stomach criticism. The film, by Cyril Tuschi, ends with the brief scene of Mr. Khodorkovsky behind glass in a courtroom cage. And in a letter quoted earlier in the film, Russia's most famous prisoner says he has no time for self-pity or thoughts of revenge because he is too busy in prison analyzing his own actions and studying his legal case. Mr. Khodorkovsky, who is widely despised among poorer Russians for making billions from murkily privatized oil wells and other assets, has also continued the Russian literary tradition of lengthy manifestos and correspondence from prison.

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