Khodorkovsky vs. Lakhtin

From the Moscow Times:

Khodorkovsky said Tuesday that he has been “deprived of my right to know what I am being accused of,” saying investigators wrote the charges in an unclear form.

Prosecutor Valery Lakhtin disagreed.

“We know that they are clear,” he told the court.

Defense lawyers said they would file a complaint with the Prosecutor General’s Office about the prosecutors’ “lies” in court.


The defense lawyers provided journalists with scanned copies of 2007and 2008 reports on Khodorkovsky’s interrogation where he wrote that hecouldn’t understand the charges.

“It is not explained whether they secretly stole oil, money or some oil products,” said Konstantin Rivkin, a lawyer for Lebedev.

The prosecution began to read the charges Tuesday. They saidKhodorkovsky and Lebedev had organized a criminal group that includedYukos top managers and shareholders Mikhail Brudno, Vasily Aleksanyan,Dmitry Gololobov and Vasily Shakhnovsky. None of them are charged inthis trial.

A team of three prosecutors in the trial was joined Monday by a fourth,Gulchekhra Ibragimova. Ibragimova was a prosecutor in the trial of the2006 killing of central banker Andrei Kozlov.