Some thoughts on the trial

Grigory Pasko, journalist

At the trial in the case of the theft of all the oil in Russia, they are reading the text of the bill of indictment – 14 volumes of 300 pages apiece. I’m familiar with this: both with the crazy quantity of volumes of the charge, and with the standard selection of pages per volume. And also with that drivel the investigators usually write when they don’t have evidence or don’t have enough of it…

The first thing that jumps out at you in this charge – the vagueness of the formulations. By the way, both the lawyers for Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev, and the defendants themselves, have already spoken about this numerous times. They have spoken justly, because that is what the law demands. According to the Code of Criminal Procedure, a charge – this is an assertion about the commission by a specific person of an act prohibited by law. If the person is not established (indicated is a supposedly organized criminal group, under which the prosecution has in mind just about 15 thousand employees of the company YUKOS), then what concreteness can be spoken of?.