Mikhail Khodorkovsky: “A country that tolerates a situation where the siloviki bureaucracy holds tens and even hundreds of thousands of talented entrepreneurs, managers and ordinary people in jail in its own interests…is a sick country”.

2 November 2010.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s last words in the Khamovnichesky district court of Moscow on the 2nd of November 2010. The court decision is expected on 15th of December 2010.

Honourable court!

Looking back, I can recall October of 2003. My last day as a free man. Several weeks after my arrest, I was informed that president Putin had decided: I was going to have to “slurp gruel” for 8 years. It was hard to believe that back then. Seven years have gone by already since that day. Seven years – quite a long stretch of time, and all the more so – when you’ve spent it in jail. All of us have had time to reassess and rethink many things. Judging by the sense of the prosecutors’ presentation: “give them 14 years” and “spit on previous court decisions”, over these years they have begun to fear me more, and to respect the law – even less. The first time around, they at least went through the effort of first repealing the judicial acts that stood in their way. Now – they’ll just leave them be; especially since they would need to repeal not two, but more than 60 decisions.

I do not want to return to the legal side of the case at this time. Everybody who wanted to understand something – has already understood everything. Nobody is seriously waiting for an admission of guilt from me. It is hardly likely that somebody today would believe me if I were to say that I stole all the oil produced by my company. But neither does anybody believe that an acquittal in the YUKOS case is possible in a Moscow court.