Moscow's Khamovnichesky District Court said on Wednesday the guilt of former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his partner Platon Lebedev charged with oil theft and embezzlement was totally proven.
Khodorkovsky and Lebedev, who have already spent seven years behind bars for tax evasion, are facing new charges of embezzling oil from Khodorkovsky's former oil firm Yukos and laundering over 3 billion rubles ($97.5 million) in revenues.
The businessmen's lawyers earlier said their clients are being judged twice for the same crime. However, the court dismissed the claims, saying both trials consider different charges as well as the crimes committed in different time periods.
The term of the new sentence is expected later today or early tomorrow, when Judge Viktor Danilkin finishes reading the full 250-page verdict in the most significant trial since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The charges are widely viewed as trumped up and ordered by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to punish Khodorkovsky for funding the liberal opposition in the early 2000s, when Russia's man of action was president.
MOSCOW, December 29 (RIA Novosti)
