Lawyers for jailed oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky on Tuesday filed a supervisory complaint over the second verdict of Moscow’s Khamovniki court in which he was found guilty of embezzling oil and money laundering.
Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s defense has filed a supervisory complaint to Moscow’s City Court chairwoman Olga Yegorova. “Lawyers strive for the revocation of [the Moscow City Court] judge Lyubov Ishumuratova’s ruling that earlier turned down a supervisory complaint over the Khamovniki district court’s verdict and the Moscow City Court’s cassation ruling,” Khodorkovsky’s official web press center said.
Khodorkovsky’s defenders say that under Russian law, a supervisory complaint must be reviewed within 30 days but Ishmuratova was reviewing it for four months, citing the necessity to “thoroughly check out all of the complainant’s arguments.”
“But despite this “thorough check”, almost all of the reasons to reject the complaint are no more than a standard set of bureaucratic tricks,” Khodorkovsky’s press center said.
The lawyers believe that the ruling to reject the supervisory complaint “does not contain any points proving that the materials of the case were studied and compared with the complainant’s arguments.”
In 2011 Khodorkovsky and his business partner and associate Platon Lebedev were near the end of an eight-year term for tax evasion when Khamovniki court convicted them of stealing oil from their own company and laundering the proceeds at a trial widely criticized abroad. Both got 14-year prison terms.
In May, the Moscow City Court upheld the sentence but reduced Khodorkovsky and Lebedev terms by one year.