Moscow, Dec. 27: A Russian judge pronounced Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his business partner Platon Lebedev guilty of embezzlement on Monday at the end of the jailed former oil tycoon’s politically-charged second trial.
The judge said the two men were also guilty of laundering stolen oil funds. Sentencing was not expected until later. The accusation of stealing oil from his now-defunct company Yukos was the main charge against Khodorkovsky in a trial seen as a test of the Kremlin’s will to impose the rule of law.
Prosecutors have asked the judge to sentence Khodorkovsky to six more years in prison on top of the eight years he is serving now. Reading the verdict in the politically charged trial of a chief Kremlin foe, judge Viktor Danilkin said the court had established that Khodorkovsky and Lebedev “carried out the embezzlement of property entrusted to the defendants.”
Khodorkovsky and Lebedev ignored the judge as he read out the widely expected guilty verdict.