Russia races to wrap up trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky

A judge raced against time yesterday to wrap up the trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky by the New Year and deliver a sentence that could keep Russia’s most famous inmate in prison for several more years.

Judge Viktor Danilkin on Monday handed down a guilty verdict against Russia’s former richest man, in a ruling condemned by the West. On Wednesday he continued to plough through the verdict which will culminate in sentencing.

Mr Khodorkovsky and his co-defendant Platon Lebedev have been in prison since 2003 after being arrested and then convicted on fraud charges that went a long way to defining the presidency of current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

The tycoon was scheduled for release next year and now faces the outcome of an embezzlement and money laundering trial that could keep him behind bars until 2017 and remove him from politics ahead of approaching elections.

The trial has been watched around the world as a test case of the Kremlin’s commitment to the court independence championed by Putin’s presidential successor Dmitry Medvedev.

But the politically-sensitive case now faces the prospect of drawing to a conclusion just as the country begins to toast the New Year – Russia’s biggest festival that also involves national holidays stretching until January 11.

Mr Khodorkovsky’s supporters have accused the court of purposefully timing the trial to deliver the verdict when most Russians’ attention is elsewhere and newspapers take an extended break.

But Mr Danilkin has been reading the estimated 800-page verdict at an impressive, if frequently inaudible, speed.

The defence said he had gone through 370 pages by yesterday afternoon, often mumbling his way through words at a murmur that could hardly be deciphered by the throngs of reporters squeezed into the tiny court room.

The verdict has seen the judge pile up incriminating evidence against the pair and yesterday he even suggested they carried out financial crimes while in detention in 2005.

“The ruling is essentially repeating the indictment, only substituting the words ‘the inquiry found’ with the words ‘the court found’,” said defence lawyer Konstantin Rivkin.

The highly-technical sentence has seen the judge issue what the defence believes are a set of unsubstantiated and contradictory rulings that threaten to send the entire hearing for a retrial.

Mr Danilkin on Tuesday ruled that even government officials who testified in Khodorkovsky’s defence – including former economy minister German Gref – in fact supported the case of the prosecution.

The Vedomosti daily speculated that this and Mr Danilkin’s mention of charges whose statute of limitation had expired meant that the court was intentionally sending the case for a second hearing.

“These kinds of ploys are often used when a judge does not want to assume responsibility,” Vedomosti wrote.