Why was Mikhail Khodorkovsky sent to jail and his company bankrupted?

Research Paper (undergraduate) from the year 2006 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Region: Russia, grade: 2, The University of Sydney, language: English, abstract: The Khodorkovsky affaire has been a big event in the media and was also criticised heavily at the time. Especially the Russian government moved into the interest of the critics. There were quite early signals that a Khodorkovsky case might develop. On the 2nd of July it started all off when Platon Lebedjew, partner in Yukos, and also the Menatep-Bank manager who was connected to Yukos moved into the spitfire of the state prosecution. At the beginning the case was about irregularities of privatisation process of a mine. That time Khodorkovsky was only invited as witness. But soon after the research process was widened into other areas of the Yukos firm. There were disagreements between the state oil firm Rosneft and Yukos about share packages of a Siberian oil firm. Platon Lebedjew was then on the 28th of July accused of tax fraud. Even at these early stages Khodorkovsky describes the whole actions against Yukos as part of a power struggle between rivalled sections around Putin. Therefore in this essay I am going to evaluate how much the government and Putin were involved in the affair and because of what reasons. Therefore I am going to focus on different theses.

Political reasons played an important role right from the beginning of the Yukos case. This became clear when Russian politicians started to comment on the case. At the beginning Wladimir Putin was not willing to interfere with the case: "In talks with the chairmen of the Russian trade union, and the association federation Arkadij Wolskij, Putin said that he would not care about Yukos and also would not put anyone into prison". (Russland-Aktuell, 2003) Even after Khodorkovsky was imprisoned, Wladimir Putin kept still and did not interfere. He was asked to take part in a discussion about the Yukos affair where he did not agree to attend. He was against the interference of the government in the prosecutions actions. But there were different members of the government that interfered right at the beginning. Michail Kassjanow was prime minister at the time and pressured the government to release Lebedjew from prison. This proposal was not accepted by the prosecution system as they were against the political interference. The affaire was given a political dimension, which goes further than the juridical discussions.