Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the German minister of foreign affairs, has met with Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s lawyer Yury Schmidt.

“I indeed had a meeting with Steinmeier and it went on for about an hour and a half,” Yury Schmidt told Interfax on Monday. “During that time we discussed the entire range of issues concerning the previous and present cases of Mikhail Khodorkovsky.”

The meeting took place, Schmidt stressed, on 15 May in St Petersburg and was held at the request of Mr Steinmeier. The lawyer was bemused by media reports that the main subject of discussion had been the possibility of transferring Mikhail Khodorkovsky nearer to Moscow.

“Steinmeier asked me many questions and since he has a legal background all the questions were of a professional nature relating to the details of the case. Among them we discussed the various ways in which Khodorkovsky and Lebedev could be released from imprisonment legally, not on exceptional grounds,” said Schmidt.

The lawyer added that he had met with the UN’s special rapporteur and they had also discussed similar issues. Schmidt commented that a great number of political figures, including those in Europe, had recently “begun to take an increased interest in what was happening to Khodorkovsky.”

(Interfax, 02.06.2008)