Moscow, Oct 25: In a dramatic escalation of a politically charged probe of Russia's largest oil company Yukos, its head Mikhail Khodorkovsky was seized by special forces in Siberia today, sent to Moscow and ordered jailed on charges including fraud and forgery Khodorkovsky could be kept until dec. 30 in a pre-trial detention facility, his lawyer Anton Drel said. The shabby and overcrowded detention units are widely considered worse than Russia's prisons. Khodorkovsky, Russia's richest man, has openly funded opposition parties and many analysts say the actions against his company are a Kremlin-directed campaign to keep him out of politics. Businessmen, meanwhile, fear that the probe will chill foreign investors' recent enthusiasm for Russia and impede the country's economic recovery.
As pressure intensified against Yukos in the probe that began this summer, Khodorkovsky vowed that he would not be driven out of Russia like the tycoons Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky, who also allege the Kremlin targeted their companies for political reasons.Khodorkovsky was charged with fraud, forgery, embezzlement and personal and corporate tax evasion among things, the prosecutor general's office said. The prosecutor's office accuses Khodorkovsky and Lebedev of causing damages of more than US$ 1 billion and damaging the Russian state, news agencies reported. The charges were filed in Moscow, where Khodorkovsky was brought after he was detained at the airport in Novosibirsk during a business trip, the main city of Siberia."The charges of the prosecutor are groundless. The detention of Mikhail Khodorkovsky is aimed at fanning a big scandal which would cover up the lack of evidence in the so-called Yukos case,'' Yukos spokesman Alexander Shadrin told the reporters.
Bureau Report