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Alexander Zemlianichenko / AP
Mikhail Khodorkovsky being escorted to a Moscow district court on Tuesday.
Khodorkovsky, on trial for a second time in a case widely seen as politically motivated, said a person whose rights have been violated or who is upset with dishonest officials has two options: a "calm" route through the courts or a "troublesome" route through public protests.
"President Dmitry Medvedev, having promised independent and honest courts, has taken on an extremely heavy but very important burden," Khodorkovsky said, reading from written remarks to Judge Viktor Danilkin from the glass-and-steel cage in Moscow's Khamovnichesky District Court.
Medvedev has said several times that he will put an end to "legal nihilism" in the judicial system.
Khodorkovsky and his business partner Platon Lebedev are accused of embezzling 350 million tons of oil valued at about 900 billion rubles ($25 billion) between 1998 and 2003 from three Yukos-controlled production units — Samaraneftegaz, Yuganskneftegaz and Tomskneft — and laundering 487.4 billion rubles and $7.5 billion between 1998 and 2004.
Khodorkovsky said Tuesday that he has been "deprived of my right to know what I am being accused of," saying investigators wrote the charges in an unclear form.
Prosecutor Valery Lakhtin disagreed.
"We know that they are clear," he told the court.
Defense lawyers said they would file a complaint with the Prosecutor General's Office about the prosecutors' "lies" in court.
The defense lawyers provided journalists with scanned copies of 2007 and 2008 reports on Khodorkovsky's interrogation where he wrote that he couldn't understand the charges.
"It is not explained whether they secretly stole oil, money or some oil products," said Konstantin Rivkin, a lawyer for Lebedev.
The prosecution began to read the charges Tuesday. They said Khodorkovsky and Lebedev had organized a criminal group that included Yukos top managers and shareholders Mikhail Brudno, Vasily Aleksanyan, Dmitry Gololobov and Vasily Shakhnovsky. None of them are charged in this trial.
A team of three prosecutors in the trial was joined Monday by a fourth, Gulchekhra Ibragimova. Ibragimova was a prosecutor in the trial of the 2006 killing of central banker Andrei Kozlov.
