Supreme Court upholds legality of claiming 17 bln rubles from Khodorkovsky, Lebedev
MOSCOW. Jan 29 (Interfax) - The Russian laws allowed the recovery of 17 billion rubles in joint debt from former Yukos executives Mikhail Khodorkovsy and Platon Lebedev, the Russian Supreme Court said.
"The particular nature of the civil law liability of Khodorkovsky and Lebedev as applied to the specific circumstances in this criminal case is predetermined and conditioned primarily by the fact that the material damage to the state was caused by the criminal actions of the convicts who committed tax evasion by unlawfully claiming on their tax returns that they had tax allowances, while acting not on behalf of legal entities but on behalf of the false entities Business Oil, Mitra, Wald Oil, and Forest Oil, and that is an integral part of the objective side of the crime for which Khodorkovsky and Lebedev were convicted," the Supreme Court plenum said in the motivating section of its resolution of January 23, 2014.
The recovery of 17 billion rubles from the suspects in the first case was ordered by the court arbitrarily, the European Court of Human Rights said earlier. Khodorkovsky had stated earlier he cannot go back to Russia because of owing the sum as part of the first criminal case.
