Khodorkovsky jailed for nine years
Tuesday, May 31, 2005 Posted: 0912 GMT (1712 HKT)

MOSCOW, Russia -- Russian tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky has been found guilty of an array of charges including fraud and tax evasion and sentenced to nine years in prison, minus time served.

The declaration of guilt and sentence came in the 12th day of the laborious verdict-reading process in the most closely watched trial of post-Soviet Russia.

Khodorkovsky, 41, former head of the Yukos oil company, has already spent 583 days in jail, meaning he would serve about another seven-and-a-half years in prison.

He was charged with fraud, tax evasion and embezzlement in a case that his supporters say is rooted in Kremlin resentment of his funding of opposition parties.

Khodorkovsky, once Russia's richest man, looked straight ahead as the sentence was pronounced. Asked if he understood what had been pronounced, he said "no sane person" could understand the verdict.

Khodorkovsky's business partner Platon Lebedev was also sentenced to nine years on the same charges. A third defendant in the case, Andrei Krainov, was given a five-and-a-half year suspended sentence.

Lawyers for Khodorkovsky and Lebedev argued that none of the evidence has shown the two were involved in alleged crimes stemming from questionable auctions of state enterprises in the 1990s.

Prosecutors had sought the maximum 10-year sentence for Khodorkovsky, who has been incarcerated since his dramatic arrest in October 2003, when his plane was stormed by special forces as it sat on the tarmac of a Siberian airport.

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