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Oil tycoon may face lighter sentence

The Moscow court reading the verdict in the trial of oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky yesterday said it considers him to have committed fraud, but indicated he could receive a lighter sentence than originally sought.

Khodorkovsky and co-defendant Platon Lebedev were on trial on seven charges including fraud, tax evasion and embezzlement in a case many observers say is Kremlin revenge for Khodorkovsky's political activities.

In the fourth day of the laborious verdict process, Judge Irina Kolesnikova said Khodorkovsky -- the former head of the Yukos oil company and once considered Russia's richest man -- and Lebedev had committed theft by fraud. But she said the court's sentencing would be guided by a section of the law calling for four to 10 years' imprisonment, rather than five to 10.

The section that would be used was in effect in 1995, when the court says Khodorkovsky and Lebedev acquired shares in a fungicide research institute through a rigged privatization auction. The indictment had charged a violation of a law that came into effect later.

The decision raised the prospect that the court could impose sentences lighter than the maximum 10 years sought by prosecutors in the politically sensitive case.

Under Russian procedures, a trial verdict, which is read aloud, is not a simple declaration of whether a defendant is guilty, but a long summation of prosecution and defense arguments and court commentary. A firm statement on guilt and on sentencing does not come until the end of the process.

The verdict reading so far has left little doubt that they would be found guilty on six of the charges, but questions remain about the seventh charge, which had been one of the key elements of the case. That charge, which said Khodorkovsky and Lebedev acquired shares in a fertilizer component company in an arrangement similar to the charge detailed yesterday, has not so far been read out in the verdict.

Defense lawyers have speculated that the court has dropped that charge because the statute of limitations has expired. The allegedly rigged purchase took place in 1994.

When the final statement might come was unclear. The verdict documents are being read aloud at the pace of about 10 pages an hour and a thick stack of papers remained.

"It's glacial!" fumed Robert Amsterdam, a Canadian lawyer on the defense team, who said he believed the pace was a clear effort at exhausting the public's attention span.

Police lined both sides of the street outside the courthouse with crowd barriers and set up metal detectors, as they have every day this week. A a small knot of anti-Khodorkovsky protesters gathered across the street to stand vigil.

The case against Khodorkovsky and Lebedev is founded on the claim that the pair acted as part of an "organized criminal group" to commit economic crimes as the country wrenched itself out of Soviet ways.

The defense contends the prosecution has failed to prove that such a group exists or show that Khodorkovsky's and Lebedev's actions were illegal under the laws of the economically chaotic 1990s.
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