The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development on Monday slammed the Russian government for its expansion into key economic sectors and raised concern about the “seemingly insatiable appetite†of Gazprom, its state-run energy giant.
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November 28, 2006Poisoned former Russian security agent Alexander Litvinenko, who died in a London hospital last week, had visited Israel lately to hand over a dossier investigating Russian energy giant Yukos case, The Times reported on Monday quoting a former Yukos owner.
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November 27, 2006Russia’s highest court on Monday rejected a legal challenge by jailed oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky against official regulations that forbid prisoners to share food with each other, The Associated Press reported Monday.
The Supreme Court rejected Khodorkovsky’s appeal of the nationwide regulation and ruled that it will remain in place, court spokesman Pavel Odintsov said. Khodorkovsky launched the challenge after prison authorities put him in an isolation cell for 10 days in June after finding food that belonged to another prisoner in his bag. In the appeal, cited on his supporters’ Web site, Khodorkovsky said the ban on sharing food violates Russian and international law.
Khodorkovsky, who was convicted in May 2005 of fraud and tax evasion in a trial Kremlin critics claimed was rigged, is serving an eight-year sentence in a Siberian prison 5,000 kilometers (3,000 miles) east of Moscow, near the Chinese border. In August, he lost an appeal to serve his sentence in the Moscow area, where he is registered and resided before his October 2003 arrest.
Supporters see the imprisonment of Khodorkovsky, once Russia’s richest man, and the dismantling of his oil empire as a Kremlin-driven campaign to eliminate a political rival and boost state control of the strategic energy sector.
In April, Khodorkovsky spent several weeks in an isolation cell after he was slashed in the face by a fellow inmate while sleeping. The tycoon has been placed in solitary confinement for infractions of prison rules three times.
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October 31, 2006A former Yukos banker wanted in Russia on embezzlement charges will not be extradited, Lithuania’s Court of Appeal quoted by RIA Novosti ruled Monday.
Lithuania granted provisional asylum last October to Igor Babenko, 55, a former manager of the embattled oil company Yukos’ Menatep St. Petersburg bank affiliate in southern Russia, and last week the country’s Supreme Administrative Court upheld his political asylum.
In Russia Babenko, who was born in Lithuania, is accused of issuing loans worth 119 million rubles ($4.42 million) to two companies in league with their executives, who allegedly pocketed the money. Russian investigators estimated the value of other schemes involving the banker at 214 million rubles (about $8 million).
On October 18, a Lithuanian prosecutor released Babenko from custody on condition he not leave the country.
Babenko has dismissed the charges against him as political. His lawyer said earlier the banker is being prosecuted only because he headed an affiliate of the bank connected with imprisoned Yukos founder Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s inner circle.
But the Trust bank, formerly known as Menatep St. Petersburg, said the case is not politically motivated. Yekaterina Tolkunova, the bank’s marketing director, said earlier the case is “a felony, pure and simple.â€
An in-house probe into the missing loans has revealed that controversial local businessmen were behind the firms that received them, Tolkunova said.
Lithuanian authorities arrested Babenko in July 2005 after a Russian court issued an arrest warrant and put the banker and his associates on an international wanted list.
In September, a Vilnius district court ruled to extradite Babenko to Russia, saying Russian authorities had provided convincing evidence. But an appeals court in the Baltic state put the extradition order on hold pending an asylum ruling.
Meanwhile, prosecutors have searched the country house of a vice president of the bankrupt company, RIA Novosti adds.
“The search of [Mikhail] Shestopalov’s dacha was conducted October 18. Investigators did not find the two pistols he had been presented with while working in the Interior Ministry, but they confiscated other arms,†Boris Kuznetsov said.
He said Shestopalov was not in Russia, and that prosecutors broke into the house, prohibiting the vice president’s wife from entering.
Kuznetsov added that he has filed a complaint against investigators and has proposed handing over the pistols they failed to find, but the Prosecutor’s General Office refused to accept them.
He said the search was illegal and suggested that it was related to the case of Leonid Nevzlin, Yukos core shareholder, who is currently living in Israel and is on the international wanted list.
Nevzlin has been charged with fraud and involvement in a number of contract killings, and was put on the international wanted list July 21, 2004.
Israel has refused to extradite him to Russia.
The Prosecutor’s General Office has offered no comment on the search so far.
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October 24, 2006
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