Putin and the Oligarch by Sakwa Richard;

Author:Sakwa, Richard;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Russian History, Russian history post-1945, contemporary Russian history, Political oppression and persecution, corruption, Oil industry, Economic history, Khodorkovsky trial
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2014-02-24T16:00:00+00:00

‌The system exposed

There were persistent rumours that on 25 December Danilkin had been escorted to the Moscow City Court, with the imputation that he was then instructed on the sentence, a gross infringement of all the rules.37 Khodorkovsky soon after wrote that although he considered Danilkin a decent man, professional and with a conscience, he had been ‘broken, badly broken’ by the system. Like other judges in Yukos trials (notably Kolesnikova in the first trial), outcomes favourable to the authorities were delivered despite evident distaste. As for the verdict, ‘That it was not Danilkin himself who wrote the verdict is clear. It was written by several people who never attended the trial.’ Concerning the accusations of murder, Khodorkovsky denied outright that Yukos had ever engaged in such behaviour, insisting: ‘We handled all problems and all individuals in the courts.’38 Khodorkovsky noted how the affair had now become deeply personal, with Putin considering him his mortal enemy.39 As for why Putin insisted that Khodorkovsky had ‘blood on his hands’, Khodorkovsky argued that he was trying ‘to convince his constituents that he is right, correctly assuming that they trust him more than they trust his Basmanny justice’. When asked: ‘Why is Putin so afraid of you? Do you know something that makes him nervous or is he afraid that you could become the leader of the dissatisfied? Or that you would demand the return of your money?’, Khodorkovsky responded that Putin’s fears were not pragmatic but irrational.40 The case demonstrated Medvedev’s powerlessness in the face of the silovik faction and his own prime minister, and exposed the isolation of the regime as a whole. As Khodorkovsky put it at the time in an open letter to the president, ‘When courts openly defy the law and the president cannot do anything about it, this is nothing short of a constitutional crisis.’41

It was also a major scandal. The court’s press secretary and aide to the presiding judge, Natalya Vasileva, confirmed on 14 February 2011 that the judge had not written the verdict himself, as prescribed by law, but had been influenced by unnamed figures in the Moscow City Court.42 The latter is ruled with a heavy hand by Yegorova, and had been involved in a number of scandals when reformist judges were dismissed and those who acquitted too many defendants censured. Vasileva’s account was later supported by a former court administrator, Igor Kravchenko. He declared that Danilkin had not wanted to take on the Yukos case, but had been forced to do it by Yegorova, with whom he regularly consulted during the trial.43 On 14 June Vasileva, who had left her job in the Khamovnichesky District Court in March, revealed that Danilkin intended to give a lighter sentence before changing his mind under pressure from above. The Agora human-rights organisation published a three-page document, which had come into Vasileva’s possession by accident along with some other signed papers, showing that Danilkin had written in a ten-year sentence (scored with three exclamation marks) as opposed to the thirteen and a half years actually given.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.