Martin Sixsmith - Putin's Oil

This book relates the story of an honorable man, and how it came about that he was defeated and lost everything because he was hated and feared by the leader of a major world power who personally subverted the supreme authority of the state to overcome him. Yukos was once Russia's largest, best managed, most productive and successful oil company. Its destruction, and the prosecution and imprisonment of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, together with other Yukos executives, constituted the most flagrant abuse of authority by a Russian president since, at least, the treatment of dissidents and the banishment of Sakharov in 1980. Driven from the start by President Vladimir Putin, the prosecution's motivations were Putin's personal animosity towards Khodorkovsky, and his fear that Russia was losing its control over its most important natural resource - oil. This was an assault of such intensity that it could be described as a personal vendetta. It seems to have had its origins in a televised meeting with President Putin in February 2003, during which Khodorkovsky described a recent purchase of an oil extraction facility by the state oil company for which a suspiciously high price had been paid. The inference was that "the excess payment had gone into the pockets of Putin and his Kremlin cronies" in an instance of corruption at the very heart of the Russian state. This meeting was the trigger for the assault on Yukos later that year. In exposing the corruption at the apex of the Russian political hierarchy Khodorkovsky had initiated a fight he would not be able to win. The second politically-motivated trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev on newly invented charges is now approaching its end. No one believes its purpose is other than to find the men guilty in order to ensure that they remain in prison, thereby compounding the injustice done to them at their first trial. The implausible charges against Khodorkovsky and Lebedev in the present trial include the theft of all the oil produced by Yukos in a six-year period. This is an inherently absurd accusation: if the oil had been stolen, Yukos could not have been the most profitable oil company in Russia and the country's largest tax-payer which, according to its reputably audited accounts, it was. There is one possible surprise outcome: use of the presidential pardon. Remembering the decision by President Gorbachev to free Academician Andrei Sakharov from internal exile in 1986, could President Medvedev show that he possesses the necessary qualities to take a similarly courageous initiative? We must hope that he does.