Former Yukos security chief jailed for murder

Published on Thursday 31 March 2005 02:00

A MOSCOW court yesterday jailed the former security chief of the oil giant Yukos for 20 years for murder.

Alexei Pichugin was found guilty last week of organising the killing of Sergei and Olga Gorin in 2002 on the orders of Leonid Nevzlin, a top Yukos executive now in exile in Israel who is wanted by Russia in connection with the case.

Analysts have been closely watching the sentencing of Pichugin for an indication of how harshly the courts will treat his former boss, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the billionaire founder of Yukos, who is on trial for tax evasion and fraud.

The prosecution has called for a maximum ten-year jail term if Khodorkovsky, who has been in detention since his arrest in October 2003, is convicted in the case, which his lawyers say could drag on until May.

The long-running trial has been accompanied by the fall of Yukos, which is now close to collapse following a 14.5 billion back-tax claim and the stripping of its biggest oil-producing unit by the state.

Tax collectors have also petitioned the court to enforce a claim against Khodorkovsky and his co-defendant Platon Lebedev for more than 370 million.

Khodorkovsky’s defence team has called the case a politically motivated show trial to punish the magnate, once credited by Forbes magazine with a 8 billion fortune, for posing a political threat to the president, Vladimir Putin.