Former Yukos Exec Found Guilty for Contract Killings; More From Russia

[WSJ_law_blog]

With yesterday’s passing of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose first major work, “A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” took its inspiration from Solzhenitsyn’s time as a guest in the Soviet gulag, we couldn’t help but think of that other famous Russian prisoner, Mikhail Khodorkovsky (pictured, left), the former chairman of the former Yukos, once Russia’s largest oil producer. (For LB background, click here.)



Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is seen during his deportation in 1946. (AP Photo)


Turns out, there’s all kinds of interesting Yukos-related news to consume. First, there’s Leonid Nevzlin, a former Khodorkovsky colleague who, after absconding to Israel, was tried — in absentia — for murder. On Friday, a Russian court sentenced Nevzlin to life in prison for allegedly ordering four contract killings of business rivals. The verdict, according to AFP, said that shootings and bomb attacks had been paid for by Nevzlin, a former Yukos executive, and Alexei Pichugin, the jailed former head of security at Yukos.

“We will appeal. This sentence is groundless. . .My client has always said this trial is politically motivated,” said Nevzlin’s lawyer, Dmitry Kharitonov.

The trial comes just days before a court in Siberia is to hold a parole hearing for Khodorkovsky himself, who’s halfway through an eight-year jail term in Penal Colony No. 10 — located six time zones east of Moscow — for alleged financial crimes involving Yukos. As we noted last month, Khodorkovsky’s lawyers filed a request for his early parole, hoping to take advantage, they said, of the Kremlin’s “course towards guaranteeing real independent courts.”



Robert Amsterdam (AP photo)


For some good afternoon reading, click here for a profile of Khodorkovsky’s lawyer, Robert Amsterdam, the Canadian lawyer who’s orchestrating Khodorkovsky’s case from behind the scenes. The piece, penned by Portfolio’s Christopher Stewart, likens Amsterdam’s life in Moscow and London to a spy movie and reports that Amsterdam has, in part, become a Soviet-style propagandist who advocates for his client at international conferences, in the media and on a blog.

In 1980, Stewart reports, Amsterdam and a friend set up a legal practice specializing in business disputes in emerging markets. In Nigeria, where Amsterdam represented a Canadian telecom company, 30 government-backed men with AK-47 assault rifles tried to break up a shareholders meeting at which Amsterdam was making a presentation. “I’ve lost track of the number of times my life has been threatened,” he says.