MOSCOW, August 9 (RIA Novosti) - Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former chief executive of the Russian oil giant Yukos who has been in custody since October 2003 on embezzlement charges, will now have to share a prison cell with eleven other inmates and will no longer have access to print and broadcast media, his press center reported Tuesday.
Defense lawyer Anton Drel confirmed reports that his client had been transferred to another building in Moscow's Matrosskaya Tishina detention compound, where cells are more crowded and have no TV sets. But he said he did not know the reason for the transfer.
Another member of Khodorkovsky's defense team, Henry Padva, said in a telephone interview that he had been away from Russia for some time now and had not heard anything about his client's transfer.
In May this year, a Moscow court sentenced Khodorkovsky and his business associate, Platon Lebedev, to nine years in prison after finding them guilty of fraud and tax evasion.
