The founder and former proprietor of the Yukos petroleum mammoth is accused on eleven cases of seven Criminal Code clauses.
The federal Prosecutor General's office charges him with big swindles-three instances; deliberate non-compliance with a court verdict in legal force, two instances; other persons' property misappropriation or misspending, two; and one instance each, forgery, material damage through swindle, and tax evasion by a juridical and a private person.
Mikhail Khodorkovsky's case has been pooled in with the case of Platon Lebedev, Menatep bank president. As the top prosecutor's experts allege, Khodorkovsky as Menatep board chair plotted with Lebedev and others to misappropriate, in summer 1994, a 20% block of Apatite Co. shares. The swindle involved more than US$283 million, says the prosecution.
The Apatite, major mining company, bases in the Kola Peninsula, Russia's northwest.
As principal Yukos stockholders and de facto proprietors in 1999-2000, Khodorkovsky and Lebedev were evading taxes and misappropriated government money to more than a billion dollars, assumes the investigation.
Khodorkovsky led a well-knit team to accumulate deposits on expatriate corporate accounts in several overseas banks, and on Russian-based affiliates' accounts in the Yukos-owned commercial banks DIB and Menatep St. Petersburg, says the indictment.
Also as crew chief, Khodorkovsky was monitoring the movement of revenues from underhand sales of apatite concentrate, oil and petrochemical products. The profits largely came from tax evasion.
Khodorkovsky, Lebedev and persons the investigation has not tracked down were engaging in a swindle, July 5, 1999, into April 28, 2000, to pump a sizeable sum to Vladimir Gusinsky, media tycoon and formerly NTV television founding proprietor. Wanted by the Russian police, he has been hiding abroad for several years now.
With bill transactions, the crew was transferring money from the Yukos and certain other Khodorkovsky-controlled companies to Gusinsky's corporate property so to rob legal owners of a lump 2.6 billion roubles, roughly $90 million, says the indictment.
