Court says tycoon’s trial not politically motivated

Europe’s top human rights court yesterday dismissed claims that Russian tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky was prosecuted for political reasons, but said some procedures during a trial against him were unfair.

The Strasboug-based European Court of Human Rights also said in its ruling that Russia unfairly charged Khodorkovsky huge tax arrears, and Russian authorities unfairly sent him and business partner Platon Lebedev to far-away penal colonies in eastern Siberia to serve their sentences, thousands of miles from their families in Moscow.

The court said “it was hardly conceivable there were no free places for the two applicants in any of the many colonies situated closer to Moscow.”

Khodorkovsky, once Russia’s richest man, was convicted in 2005 for evading taxes and sentenced to nine years in prison. He and his business partner Planton Lebedev were tried again in 2010 and convicted of stealing oil from their own company and laundering the proceeds. Khodorkovsky was sentenced to 13 years in prison after the second trial. He is due for release in October 2014, after an appeals court commuted his sentence by two years.

The case against Khodorkovsky is widely seen as President Vladimir Putin’s punishment for the tycoon’s political ambitions and his support for the opposition. Khodorkovsky had funded political parties and civil society initiatives widely seen as challenging the Kremlin.

The court ordered the Russian government to pay €10,000 to Khodorkovsky, a very small sum compared to the money that he and his oil company Yukos lost since his arrest a decade ago.

The court, however, found no proof that the case was politically driven, saying that although “the court was prepared to admit that some government officials had their own reasons to push” for Khodorkovsky’s conviction, “it was insufficient to conclude that the applicants would not have been convicted otherwise.”

The court also dismissed a claim that the trial was unfair but found violations in what it described as “unfair taking and examination of evidence” by the Moscow court, and for breaching of lawyer-client confidentiality.

Khodorkovsky’s lawyer Karinna Moskalenko told The Associated Press that she was “very pleased” with the ruling and would not appeal it. “The entire trial was unfair. This (ruling) should trigger the conviction to be annulled in accordance with the Russian legislation.”

Lyudmila Alexeyeva, Russia’s veteran human rights activist, was disappointed by the court’s finding that the trial was not politically motivated.