Khodorkovsky’s business partner Platon Lebedev is currently in a pre-trial detention center in Arkhangelsk, where he will stay at least until Friday evening, his lawyer Yelena Liptser said on Tuesday.
“We found Platon Leonidovich [Lebedev] in a pre-trial detention center in the city of Arkhangelsk, from which a videoconference scheduled for Friday will be held with the Moscow City Court on the consideration of his appeal against extensions of detention,” Liptser said.
She said Lebedev was transferred to the pre-trial detention center from Penal Colony 14 in the Arkhangelsk Region’s city of Velsk in northwestern Russia.
A law enforcement source said on Friday that Lebedev, serving a 13-year sentence for oil embezzlement and money laundering, had arrived in Penal Colony 14.
Liptser said she does not know which jail Lebedev will complete his term in prison.
Last week, a source in the penal system administration said that Khodorkovsky was delivered to Penal Colony 7 near the town of Segezha in Russia’s northwestern Karelia region.
Khodorkovsky and Lebedev filed a parole request on May 27.
Khodorkovsky, the former head of Yukos oil company convicted of embezzlement and tax fraud, appealed against his sentence and a second trial in Moscow. He was sentenced to an additional six years on top of his initial eight year sentence by a Moscow court in December 2010, later reduced by one year. He is now due for release in 2016.
Moscow Preobrazhensky Court returned jailed tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s request to be released on parole to a pre-trial detention center in Moscow, where he was moved last year to undergo a second trial and subsequent appeal hearing, Khodorkovsky’s press service said on Monday.
The two men have denied all charges against them, saying that they were revenge for Khodorkovsky’s funding of opposition parties during the presidency of Vladimir Putin, something the Russian authorities categorically deny.