MOSCOW, May 20 (RIA Novosti) - On Friday, a Moscow court continued announcing a verdict for Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the ex-chief of the Yukos oil major, Platon Lebedev and Andrei Krainov, the respective executives of Menatep and Volna, Yukos' affiliates.
The announcement has continued for the fifth day already.
The 10-month trial of the Yukos executives has ended and three judges are reading out the verdict by turns.
The defense lawyers are aware the process will take a rather long time.
The judges have already laid out the facts and proceeded to the motivation statement. Of a total of 11 episodes in the charges against Khodorkovsky and Lebedev the judges mentioned ten, excluding the misappropriation of a 20-percent share block in the Apatit fertilizer producer. The prosecution had insisted on a guilty verdict for Khodorkovsky and Lebedev on the charges of the Apatit shares misappropriation, but asked to release them from penalty citing the statute of limitations.
The court found that acting within a criminal group Khodorkovsky had misappropriated the receipts from apatite concentrate sales and evaded, along with Lebedev, paying corporate and personal taxes.
Khodorkovsky has been kept in a pretrial detention center for nearly 18 months already, while Lebedev was arrested earlier and has been in jail for a year and eight months. They are facing charges under seven articles of the Russian Criminal Code, including tax evasion and massive fraud.
Khodorkovsky and Lebedev have pleaded innocent throughout the trial, while Krainov has only admitted guilt in part. Prosecutors insisted on the guilty verdict for both of them on all charges and ten years in a minimum-security correctional labor camp, and on 5.5 years of imprisonment on parole for Krainov.
Natalya Veshnyakova, the chief of the information and public relations department of the Prosecutor General's Office, said last week Khodorkovsky and Lebedev would face new charges shortly. "They will be charged with laundering illegally earned money, billions of rubles," she said.
