Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin denied on Thursday that he put pressure on a Moscow court with his assessment of jailed former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who is awaiting a verdict in a money laundering trial.
When asked about Khodorkovsky during annual televised Q&A session Putin said that thieves should be imprisoned.
Referring to a line from the Soviet film "The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed," Putin said: "I think that a thief should be in jail."
"I was asked a question and I do not regard [the answer I gave] as pressure," Putin said, adding that he was referring to the sentence already passed on Khodorkovsky.
"As for the new cases, the court will look at them objectively."
Khodorkovsky and his business partner Platon Lebedev, who have already spent seven years behind bars for tax evasion, are facing new charges of embezzling 218 million tons of oil from Khodorkovsky's former oil firm Yukos and laundering over 3 billion rubles ($97.5 million) in revenues. If found guilty, the two men face another seven years in jail.
The verdict in the new trial was due to be announced on Wednesday, but reporters arriving at Moscow's Khamovniki district court found a notice stating that the session had been postponed until December 27. No reason was given for the delay.
Putin compared Khodorkovsky to convicted U.S. fraudster Bernie Madoff, who was sentenced to 150 years in prison after defrauding investors of billions of dollars, saying Russia's courts were liberal by comparison.
"Our courts are the most humane in the world," Putin concluded in a tongue-in-cheek quote from another Soviet-era film.
MOSCOW, December 16 (RIA Novosti)
