Introduction

After the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then Chairman of Yukos, Russia's largest oil company last October, I distributed a summary and analysis of the charges against him as set forth in Report published by the Prosecutor General. As I noted in that summary, the case against Khodorkovsky has become a major focus of attention of the legal community and is being viewed as an important, if informal, precedent regarding important aspects of criminal and commercial law in Russia. Although the Western press has focused on the case as a political rather than legal event, ...