President Dmitry Medvedev has taken issue with the assertion that Russian courts mete out selective justice to businessmen.
In an interview with Bloomberg TV, he cited statistics from the Prosecutor General's Office to prove that former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky was not being victimized.
Last year alone 1,000 private entrepreneurs and some 3,000 business executives were prosecuted for tax evasion, Medvedev said.
"That is a very serious figure. I did not even expect it to be so [high]," he said.
Medvedev said he had studied specific cases and "some of them [businessmen] got eight to 10 to 15 years in prison."
"So all that talk about the selective application of justice is not quite correct," he said.
On New Year's Eve, Khodorkovsky and his business partner Platon Lebedev were sentenced to another six years in jail after being found guilty of stealing millions of tons of oil from their now defunct company Yukos in a trial broadly viewed as political revenge from Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. The two men are expected to remain in jail until 2017.
MOSCOW, January 27 (RIA Novosti)
