Russian tycoon Khodorkovsky declares hunger strike

[May 18, 2010]  MOSCOW (AP) -- Imprisoned Russian tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky has gone on a hunger strike to draw attention to what he claims are improper court rulings against suspects charged with economic crimes, his lawyers said Tuesday.

In an open letter to the chairman of the Supreme Court, Khodorkovsky said Russia's courts are ignoring recent legal changes that allow people charged with economic crimes to avoid pretrial detention.

President Dmitry Medvedev spearheaded the amendments, which went into effect earlier this year, after a young, high-profile lawyer died in 2009 while in detention. The changes allow people charged with committing white-collar crimes to be released on bail.

Khodorkovksy, 46, said he is aware of several instances when courts have ignored the amendments and not granted suspected white-collar criminals the option to post bail.

Khodorkovsky is serving an eight-year sentence for tax evasion and is under investigation on charges of embezzling more than $25 billion worth of oil from three subsidiaries of Yukos, his former oil company.

Both cases are politically tinged, with critics saying Khodorkovsky was singled out by the Kremlin and falsely charged to punish him for funding opposition parties and for his own political ambitions.

But Khodorkovsky said the hunger strike is not related to his cases.

"This is not about me. ... I can't agree with such bald-faced sabotage of a law that was drafted by the Russian president himself," he wrote.

"Since legal avenues have achieved nothing, he is compelled to take such a step, and we hope that this message -- as extreme as it is -- will be finally heard," his lawyer Vadim Klyuvgant told Associated Press Television News.

Last month Vera Trifonova, a 53-year-old businesswoman who was reported to have diabetes and chronic kidney failure, died in the Matrosskaya Tishina jail in Moscow while awaiting trial for fraud.

Her death followed that of Sergei Magnitsky, 37, who had been in the same jail in November when he died due to untreated pancreatitis. Magnitsky had been arrested on tax-evasion charges linked to his work with Hermitage Capital Management, a multibillion-dollar fund headed by U.S.-born British investor William Browder.

Khodorkovsky conducted a 14-day hunger strike in 2008 to protest authorities treatment of former Yukos executive Vasily Aleksanian, who faces trial despite being gravely ill.

[Associated Press]

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