EU ziet proces tegen Khodorkovsky als een test voor Medvedev (en)
EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - EU kremlinologists are watching the trial of fallen oil baron Mikhail Khodorkovksy to see if Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has the power to make good on promises of legal reform.
Mr Khodorkovsky, the founder of now-defunct oil firm Yukos, stands accused of stealing over €20 billion from the company in a new trial which opened in Moscow on Tuesday (4 March).
Once Russia's richest man, he fell from grace in 2003 after promoting political transparency and human rights. He has spent the past five years in prison on tax evasion charges. Yukos has been broken up and sold off to state-owned energy firms Rosneft and Gazprom. If found guilty on the new charges, he faces another 22 years in jail.
Khodorkovsky supporters see him as a hero who stood up to the Kremlin and is being punished by hardliners such as deputy prime minister Igor Sechin and prime minister Vladimir Putin i. Sceptics see him as an oligarch with a shady past who overreached himself in a bid to become president.
The trial is taking place amid EU worries over growing lawlessness in Russia.
The killers of anti-Kremlin journalist Anna Politkovskaya have not been brought to justice after more than two years. Human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov was in January shot in broad daylight in Moscow. In terms of murders per capita, Russia is the fifth most dangerous place in the world.
The break-up of Yukos also set a poor precedent for private property rights. In 2006, courts forced Shell to sell its stake in the Sakhalin-2 gas field to Gazprom. In 2007, BP was also forced to sell its rights to the Kovytka gas field to Gazprom.
Russian President Medvedev has promised to stamp out what he called "legal nihilism" in Russia.
"So long as I am at the head of this country, so long as I am President of the Russian Federation, this is the principle upon which I will base myself. We need to protect the courts from any attempts to influence them, whether by business corporations or by state agencies," he said last July on the Khodorkovsky case.
Some analysts fear he has no real power, however. Or that his statements are part of a double act with hard man Mr Putin, designed to confuse critics of the Russian administration.
"The way this trial is handled will say a lot about how far President Medvedev has managed to pursue his objectives of reforming the judiciary," an EU official said. "We'll have to see to what extent this trial is political. The signs are there are some people in the Russian leadership who would like to see Mr Khodorkovsky disappear for good."
The conduct of the Khodorkovsky trial is likely to come up at EU-Russia talks on 13 May in Kaliningrad on creating a "Common Space of Freedom, Security and Justice" in Europe. It could also impact negotiations on human rights and energy security clauses in a new "Strategic Partnership" agreement with Russia.
So far, so bad
Mr Khodorkovsky's lawyer, Robert Amsterdam, says the new charges are so ridiculous they should never have made it to court. With the proceedings just three days old, the defence has already accused the judge of political bias and says it is being blocked from giving documents to its client.
"I believe in investing in Russia. But it has to be done where you've got real rule of law developing," Mr Amsterdam told EUobserver. "If they manage to secure a conviction in these egregious circumstances, it is an extremely bad sign in terms of the security of foreign investments."
But the news is not all bad. Independent legal experts told the European Commission that the trial last month of three Politkovskaya murder suspects, which led to their acquittal, was fair despite the highly-charged political atmosphere.
Meanwhile, EU energy companies are keeping their options open. "We're not expanding investments in Russia at the moment because we don't have the money to do it," BP spokesman Toby Odone told this website. "Our investment experience has been a good one so far. We had a fight with our partners, not with the state."
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