Суд мести

We had another reason not to worry. At that time we had the blessing of Putin himself and Aleksandr Voloshin, his chief of staff, to sell part of YukosSibneft to an American oil company.

Events then developed as follows.

As I said earlier, at the beginning of April Prosecutor-General Ustinov wrote to Putin that Apatit had a clean bill of health. The Yukos investigation team, which was formed in March, started convening regularly somewhere about mid-April. At the Procuracy General Yuriy Biryukov, one of the deputy prosecutor generals, was put in charge of the Yukos case. At the FSB the equivalent job went to Yuriy Zaostrovtsev, head of the Economic Security Department.

The economic complaints put to the team only concerned the supposedly illegal sale of Apatit, even though Ustinov had already reported to Putin that there had been nothing untoward. But they simply had nothing else to latch onto. At the time Yukos was so clean and transparent that even they realised there was no chance of a tax audit turning up anything big. In the spring of 2003 they were still reluctant to show their hand, as they did when they put Khodorkovskiy inside and subsequently.

So they decided the first line of attack against us would be the murder cases, which they could use to discredit us in Russia and in the West - the allegation being that we would resort to any means to turn a profit and that we had even had people killed. Back then this was nonsense. It's still nonsense now, but that wasn't going to deter them - given the way the courts were organised, they could do what they wanted.

The investigation team started to seek out criminal cases in which Yukos figured in one way or another. They unearthed several ancient ones in which employees of Yukos or Menatep Bank had been the victims. In particular, they dug up one case from 1998 in which a Rosprom employee, Viktor Kolesov, had been assaulted. They found another case, about the disappearance of the former manager of Menatep's Tambov branch, Sergey Gorin, and here it turned out that the godfather to Gorin's son was a member of the Yukos security service, Aleksey Pichugin. They found the case of an explosion in the stairwell of a block of flats on the outskirts of Moscow, where the parents of a former Menatep employee, Olga Kostina, lived. Naturally, they revisited the murder of the mayor of Nefteyugansk, and several other cases as well.

All these cases had one thing in common - they had all gone cold. Only the explosion where Kostina's parents lived ended in a result. A gang from Tambov was convicted, but the motive and who hired them remained unknown.

The purpose of reviving all these cases was to find some kind of path to me. Since they did not, and could not, have any piece of paper with my signature on it, they decided to take one of our employees prisoner and extract some kind of testimony against me. So in June 2003 that is what they did.

It turned out that Olga Kostina, her of the explosion, who had formerly worked for Menatep Bank, was now an adviser to the head of the FSB. In March 2003 she told prosecutors that she had seen me with Aleksey Pichugin, who worked for the Yukos security service, in a restaurant back in September 2002. Later, at Pichugin's trial, one of her friends testified that she had also seen Pichugin with me in my office.

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