The Moscow Times
Friday, August 18, 2006. Issue 3478. Page 3. Pichugin Gets 24 Years in Murders By Catherine Belton Staff Writer
The Moscow City Court convicted Yukos' former security chief Alexei Pichugin on Thursday of organizing two murders and two attempted murders and sentenced him to 24 years in a prison camp.
Pichugin's lawyers will appeal the ruling, which they said was based largely on hearsay and third-hand testimony from a convicted criminal and a dead man.
State Prosecutor Kamil Kashayev, who had asked for a life sentence, called the verdict just. But he insisted that Pichugin had been carrying out orders for key Yukos executives, including Mikhail Khodorkovsky's closest lieutenant, Leonid Nevzlin.
"No one has the right to take away anyone's life. But this is what Pichugin's organization was doing," Kashayev told a barrage of television cameras after the verdict was announced. "Twenty-four years is a fitting sentence for what he did."
Thursday's verdict is yet another watershed in the three-year onslaught against Khodorkovsky's Menatep business empire. The legal assault has all but destroyed Yukos, once the country's largest oil company, and led to the jailing of several Yukos executives, including Khodorkovsky, in what was widely seen as a political campaign of selective justice and skewed rulings. The Pichugin case has been seen as vital in a state drive to blacken Yukos' name and have Nevzlin extradited from Israel.
Before Thursday's verdict, Pichugin was serving a 20-year sentence after being convicted of a double murder and two attempted murders last year. The judge on Thursday decided to extend that sentence to 24 years.
Kashayev declined to comment on whether more charges would follow.
Together with Pichugin, five other men were convicted Thursday of being accomplices in the killings.
Two of them, Yevgeny Reshetnikov and Gennady Tsigelnik, had accused Pichugin and Nevzlin of ordering the killings, Kashayev said.
Nevzlin denies the charges.
The judge found Pichugin guilty of organizing the 1998 killing of Nefteyugansk Mayor Vladimir Petukhov, saying the attack was revenge for the mayor's campaign against Yukos for not paying taxes. The judge also found Pichugin guilty of the 1998 death of Valentina Korneyeva, a Moscow businesswoman, who, according to the judge, was killed for refusing to hand over her office to Khodorkovsky's Bank, Menatep.
In both cases, Reshetnikov and Tsigelnik -- who sat before the court in a glass cage together with Pichugin and the others on trial Thursday -- admitted to pulling the trigger.
Even though they had admitted their guilt and testified against Pichugin, they were sentenced to 17 years and 18 years in prison camp, respectively.
Pichugin was also found guilty of organizing two attempts on the life of Yevgeny Rybin, the director of Vienna-based East Petroleum Handelsgas, who was squeezed out as a trading partner of Tomskneft shortly after Yukos took over Tomskneft in 1998. His bodyguard died in one of the attacks.
Rybin, who attended the trial Thursday, claimed victory but said the main movers behind the attempts on his life had still gotten off scot-free. "No one thinks that Pichugin did this by himself," he said. "He was defending stolen billions. This is Khodorkovsky, Nevzlin ... and others."
Pichugin's lead lawyer, Georgy Kaganer, derided the verdict as being based on hearsay.
Even if the killings benefited Yukos, there was no proof that Pichugin took part, he said. "The case is only based on the words of Reshetnikov and Tsigelnik," he said.
In Petukhov's murder, Kaganer said, Reshetnikov admitted he had been ordered only to wound, and not kill, the mayor. But Reshetnikov decided that the rifles he was told to use would be ineffective and instead shot the mayor with a machine gun, killing him instantly, Kaganer said. "The responsibility for Petukhov's death should lie with Reshetnikov, not Pichugin," he said.
The judge was often inaudible as he read the verdict for six hours in a hot and airless courtroom. But he often mentioned that testimony from Tambov businessman Sergei Gorin, who purportedly put together the team of killers-for-hire for Pichugin, had formed a major part of his ruling.
Pichugin was convicted of killing Gorin and his wife in 2002 last year. Their bodies, however, have never been found. The prosecution claims that before his death, Gorin told a convicted criminal, Igor Korovnikov, that if anything happened to him, Pichugin and Menatep were to blame.
Kaganer and Pichugin's relatives said they were astounded at how much of the case was based on third-hand evidence from a convicted criminal and a dead man.
"Can you imagine the degree of absurdity," said Pichugin's mother, Alla Pichugina. "The case is based on the words of a dead man."
Three other alleged accomplices, Vladimir Shapiro, Mikhail Ovsyannikov and Vladislav Levin, were sentenced to 19, 10 and seven years and six months in a prison camp, respectively.
http://www.moscowtimes.ru/stories/2006/08/18/011.html
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