On April 16, the Moscow City Court is to consider the Russian Prosecutor-General’s office’s appeal against a ruling of the Basmanny Court that the preliminary investigations in the new criminal case against Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev, conducted in Chita, were illegal.

On March 20, Moscow’s Basmanny Court declared against the law the Chita location of the investigations into the case against the ex-head of Yukos and the former head of international financial organization Menatep. In doing so, the Court upheld the joint appeal of Khodorkovsky and Lebedev’s lawyers against the choice of Chita as the location, and obliged the Prosecutor-General’s office to expunge any and all violations. In the appeal the defense argued that, since the alleged crimes had taken place in Moscow, the preliminary investigation should by law have been held in the capital.

‘This is not yet a final victory, but the Basmanny Court has done much better than we imagined. We have to hope that this decision will stand up on appeal, since the grounds for it were impeccable’, Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s lawyer Yuri Schmidt told Interfax.

Elena Liptser said that, if the Basmanny Court’s ruling comes into effect, Khodorkovsky and Lebedev will have to be moved to Moscow. She stressed that the Basmanny court had ‘found that Khodorkovsky and Lebedev’s constitutional right to a defense had been violated’.

(Interfax, 04.04.2007)