Jailed businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who is seeking release on parole, has been reprimanded twice, his lawyer said on Wednesday.
Vadim Klyuvgant said Khodorkovsky, who is to be set free in 2016, had been reprimanded for giving a pack of cigarettes to his cellmate and for waiting for instructions from a welder who had left the work area in the welder’s study, or “an inappropriate place” to wait as the prison administration put it.
Khodorkovsky is serving his 13-year sentence for fraud and tax evasion in a Karelian prison in northwestern Russia.
The defense said these reprimands could be a hurdle for Khodorkovsky’s appeal for release on parole.
Khodorkovsky’s business partner Platon Lebedev, who is also serving a 13-year sentence on the same charges in a different penal colony in northern Russia, also received two reprimands. The court later decided that Lebedev did not deserve to be freed on parole.