The New York Times: Russian Exile From Yukos Assails Putin as a Despot

TEL AVIV, March 20 – A longtime business associate of the imprisoned Russian oil tycoon Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky spoke out from self-imposed exile here on Sunday, denying criminal charges by the Russian authorities and saying the accusations against him are a continuation of a Kremlin campaign of intimidation.

“The situation in Russia today I would describe as Stalinism,” the associate, Leonid B. Nevzlin, said in a rare interview at his home in Herzliya, Israel’s high-tech hub in the Tel Aviv suburbs. He said President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia “enjoys the absolute power of one person, in that he uses the law enforcement system and the lack of free press” to intimidate Russia’s business elite and renationalize Yukos, once Russia’s largest private oil company.

Yukos has been torn apart in a struggle between the Kremlin and Mr. Khodorkovsky that has shaken Western confidence and helped drive oil prices to record highs. It has also prompted Russia’s business elite to re-evaluate the Kremlin’s commitment to capitalism, and consider whether the leadership is seeking something akin to state control of the economy’s commanding heights. Mr. Putin says he is simply trying to punish a tax cheat and, more broadly, to rein in oligarchs who bought influence with their overnight fortunes after the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Yukos’s largest oil field was auctioned off last year to pay off extensive back taxes, but two remaining production units continue to pump a total of 600,000 barrels of oil a day — and Mr. Nevzlin is now controlling shareholder in the company after Mr. Khodorkovsky transferred his stake in January. Mr. Nevzlin estimates his net worth in the “hundreds of millions, but not billions” of dollars. “We’re trying to learn to live without the pipeline of oil,” he said, with a bitter grin, of himself and other shareholders.

Mr. Nevzlin fled to Israel nearly two years ago, amid a Kremlin-backed investigation into the oil company and its top executives. In July 2004, a Moscow court called for his arrest on charges of conspiracy to aid in the killings of a married couple in the 1990’s and of trying to kill Olga Kostina, formerly public relations director of Moscow City Hall and a onetime adviser to Yukos. Prosecutors have also accused him of evading taxes and appropriating shares of oil assets that became Yukos during the no-holds-barred era of post-Soviet privatization.

Israel has ignored an outstanding Interpol request from Russian law enforcement officials to extradite Mr. Nevzlin on the charges, which he vehemently denies. He also defends Yukos’s former security chief, Aleksei Pichugin, who has been charged with murder and attempted murder in the same cases and has been in detention since his arrest in June 2003.

“There is no evidence and no proof against him or me,” he said. “This so-called trial is full of trumped-up charges and falsifications.”

Moscow City Court will question Mr. Pichugin on Tuesday. His trial has been closed to the public.

Mr. Nevzlin said the Russian judicial system “is using illegal methods and taking hostages” among former Yukos employees. A British judge on Friday rejected Russian government claims seeking the extradition of a Yukos accountant and a lawyer who had fled to London.

In the interview, in which Mr. Nevzlin spoke Russian, he for the first time publicly made the accusation that an element of anti-Semitism was behind the Kremlin’s campaign against him and other Yukos executives, some of whom are also Jewish. He joined a number of prominent Russian billionaires who have either fled to or established dual citizenship in Israel, including Vladimir Gusinsky, now a media tycoon.

“Putin is surrounded by anti-Semites,” he said, “from the prosecutors all the way to the F.S.B.,” the successor intelligence agency to the K.G.B.

Mr. Putin has campaigned publicly on behalf of a rebuilt Jewish community in Russia, appointed a chief rabbi for the country, and said at a ceremony at Auschwitz this year he was “ashamed” of anti-Semitic acts in Russia.

Mr. Nevzlin said Sunday that he planned to sue in European and American courts on behalf of other shareholders over the seizing of Yukos’s assets. “When we start shaping the new board of directors, we will represent interests of all shareholders,” he said, hinting that Western pension funds and other foreign investors may sit on the new board. He declined to identify any candidates.

Property rights in Russia “do not exist in the Western sense,” he said, adding, “All kinds of rights in Russia are selective.”

He said he would also finance political opposition candidates running in 2008 presidential elections, including the chess champion Gary Kasparov and former Prime Minister Mikhail M. Kazyanov.

“There is the possibility of a liberal, democratic structure in Russia,” he said. “But it will take tremendous work to create it, and only if the will of the electorate coincides.”

Source: The New York Times, Russian Exile From Yukos Assails Putin as a Despot, March 21, 2005