Yukos Report Authors to Face Questioning

(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – June 25, 2013) Two of the co-authors of the expert report into the second Yukos case have been asked to attend interviews by the Investigative Committee, a news report said Tuesday.

Lawyer Mikhail Subbotin told Kommersant that he would attend an interview Wednesday, while earlier this week it was reported that former Constitutional Court Judge Tamara Morshakova, who worked alongside Subbotin on the report, had also been summoned for questioning. Her interview is likely to take place Thursday.

In December 2011, Subbotin and Morshakova formed part of the nine-strong presidential human rights council that acquitted Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his business partner Platon Lebedev of oil-theft and money-laundering charges.

However, the country’s Investigative Committee has refused to accept the report’s conclusions, believing that the experts were bought off by the two businessmen and their associates.

Investigators believe that money was transferred to Morshakova through an organization run by Yelena Novikova, director of the Higher School of Economic’s legal and economic research center, Lenta.ru reported.

Since the report was published, the panel’s experts have faced much scrutiny from investigators.

The research center, where Subbotin worked as a deputy director, was left crippled by the seizure of its computers in September 2012. Meanwhile, the family home of Novikova, who also worked on the 2011 report, was raided in April.

Former dean of the New Economic School Sergei Guriev recently resigned and moved to Paris after being questioned in connection with the case.

In total, searches have been carried out on four of the six Russian experts who helped conduct the original report.