YEKATERINBURG, June 4 (RIA Novosti) – Leading Russian economist Sergei Guriev, who left Moscow for Paris last week over concerns about possible prosecution, can return safely to Russia if he has not broken the law, President Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday.
“Are there any grounds to put him into jail? I don’t know anything about this. I learned his last name recently, and I don’t know of any transgressions against the law by him. If he has not made any transgression, then nothing threatens him, 100 percent,” Putin said.
“He deals with economic activity. Let him do this work where he wants and where he likes it most,” Putin said.
Guriev resigned last week as rector of Moscow's prestigious New Economic School and fled to Paris after being questioned recently by Russia’s Investigative Committee in connection with the Yukos oil company case.
In 2011, Guriev contributed an expert statement to a Presidential Civil Society and Human Rights Council report on the legality of the second Yukos case, maintaining Yukos founder Mikhail Khodorkovsky was not guilty.
Once the country’s largest oil company, Yukos was declared bankrupt in 2004 and its assets were taken over by Rosneft. Many, particularly in the West, claim the case was politically motivated, although the Russian authorities deny this.
In 2005, Khodorkovsky and his partner Platon Lebedev were sentenced to eight years in prison for fraud and tax evasion as part of the first Yukos case. In late 2010, a Moscow district court sentenced them to 14 years in prison for stealing oil and laundering money as part of a second case.
Their sentences were reduced on appeal, and taking into account time served they are due for release in 2014. Russian media reports have speculated recently they could face a third trial to keep them behind bars.
Guriev, meanwhile, told Prime news agency by phone he had not changed his decision to stay abroad, for reasons of his security.
“I wouldn’t comment on his [Putin’s] statement. It will not influence my decision to stay abroad," he said. "I have not breached anything but I have every reason to believe, and my recent experience tells me, that a person who has not breached anything may be threatened with many things in my case.”
