Mikhail Khodorkovsky speaks before the Chita court

Statement made before the Ingodinsky district court in Chita at the 29 July-1 August hearings into the complaint lodged by Khodorkovsky’s lawyers against the unlawful actions (inaction) and decisions of the investigators.

The charge brought against me involves the perpetration of unlawful and artificially criminalised deeds, that carry a penalty envisaged in the Russian Federation Civil Code.

In our judicial proceedings, however, the presumption of innocence is, to all intents and purposes, absent. The defence is deprived of its right to familiarise itself with the essential evidence while the investigators, fully aware of the criminal implications of their actions, conceal evidence and in every way obstruct our chance of obtaining access to that evidence.

The evidence produced, the expert testimony, has quite simply been falsified. The resultant texts are flagrant examples of illiteracy. My comments about the evident instances of falsification pass without response. Finally, and most important of all, material evidence, the electronic data bases, have been withheld from me.

We have repeatedly requested that specific items of evidence be added to the case documentation:

• The Sofit electronic data base that contains information about Yukos’ perimeter of consolidation. This data base was created, at Yukos’ request, by PricewaterhouseCoopers Audit Ltd. It must be included since the evidence based on this source, as presented in the case files, is contradictory;

• The Galactica electronic accounting data base. This is essential since the “registers” fabricated by the prosecution in order to seek expert testimony, not only contradict the demands of the law but even those elementary and generally known factual details about the volume of oil output (in the latter case, several times over). As a result, superfluous tens of millions of tons of oil appear, both in the expert testimony and the charge sheet, with reference to a single year;

• The data bases “Disclosure of information for the Federal Financial Markets Service”, “Disclosure of information for the media and for investors”, and “Disclosure of information for the US Securities & Exchange Commission”. They are essential because they contain information about the activities of Yukos’ subsidiary enterprises. Their accounts are not included in the case documentation yet the investigators assert that it was precisely from these subsidiaries that oil was stolen.

There is enough information in the case files to show that the data bases exist; reference to their contents indicate that they are being held at the disposal of the investigators.

The information contained in these data bases makes it possible to establish with accuracy the relation between Yukos’ various sources of income and items of expenditure and relate these to its earnings. In turn the earnings can then be linked to the audit indicators, obtained by multiplying the sold volumes of output by market prices. In brief, the absence of loss, the necessary correlate of misappropriation, can be established.

It has not been possible at the preliminary, pre-trial stage of investigation to present the team of investigators and the prosecutor with these data. After their receipt they would have inevitably dropped the charges. Instead I shall be forced to wait until the evidence supporting the charges has been presented in court. Then, and only then, will it be possible to present the evidence which I am now requesting be added to the case documentation.

In other words, I am effectively being sentenced to a further, lengthy period of detention with no good reason while being deprived of the opportunity to help the investigation and the prosecution, through their own efforts, to subject the evidence to a critical re-examination.