MOSCOW, March 11 (RIA Novosti) - The defense team acting for the Yukos founder and his business partner plan to summon Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin to testify in a new trial of their clients, one of the lawyers said on Wednesday.
Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev, already in prison after convictions on tax evasion and theft charges described by many critics as politically motivated, now face a new trial accused of embezzlement and money laundering totaling about $50 billion.
"Kudrin signed a series of regulatory documents ... Being law-abiding citizens Khodorkovsky and Levedev were guided by them [in their business decisions], and we would like Kudrin to give testimony at the trial," Konstantin Rivkin, who is acting for Lebedev, said without elaborating further.
Another lawyer, Yelena Liptser, confirmed the defense would press for Kudrin, who is also a deputy prime minister, to testify in the trial. She said other former senior officials were also on the list of witnesses for the defense in the case, but declined to name them.
The Finance Ministry said on Wednesday it had received no subpoenas or other documents from the court requesting Kudrin to testify. "No official documents to this effect have been sent to the ministry," an official said.
Preliminary hearings in the new case against Khodorkovsky, 45, and Lebedev, 42, who are serving eight-year sentences, started in Moscow last Tuesday. The defense lawyers have described the charges as "ridiculous," and said prosecutors lacked evidence of the crimes.
Rivkin also said on Wednesday the defense team had asked for the dismissal of two prosecutors in the new trial, accusing them of submitting evidence that was not true. The court turned down the request on Wednesday.
The lawyers already demanded prosecutors Dmitry Shokhin and Valery Lakhtin be dismissed last week, saying they had been involved in the first trial of the businessmen and were biased.
They had also accused the presiding judge of bias and requested his dismissal. Viktor Danilkin refused to step down, saying there were no grounds for his dismissal.
Rivkin said the court was still to rule on the defense's request to dismiss the new charges against their clients for lack of evidence. He said the lawyers would also demand some evidence be removed from the case files as untrue and the case returned for further investigation.
The lawyer said the preliminary hearings were unlikely to end this week.
Once Russia's largest oil producer, Yukos collapsed after charges of tax evasion led to the company being broken up and sold off to meet debts. The bulk of the company's assets were bought up by state-run oil company Rosneft and it was declared bankrupt in 2006.
