Putin versus Khodorkovsky. ‘Justice’ postponed

Why was the verdict in Russia's sensational trial delayed?

UNIFORMED students from the nearby railway academy wrestled with each other for free “Send Khodorkovsky Home” T-shirts which the tycoon's supporters were distributing outside the Meshchansky court in Moscow.

Across the road, the liberal activists for whom Mikhail Khodorkovsky has, perhaps a little improbably, become an icon of dissent, went ahead with their rally. But, as a laconic note taped to the court's door on the morning of April 27th revealed, the verdict in Mr Khodorkovsky's ten-month trial - the climax of President Vladimir Putin's vendetta against Russia's erstwhile richest man - had been delayed.

Why? There are almost as many theories as there were when, in October 2003, Mr Khodorkovsky was arrested on a Siberian runway. It seemed unlikely that the ex-boss of Yukos, once Russia's top oil company, could have struck a five-to-midnight deal with the government. (The court is universally seen as a Kremlin tool.) He and Platon Lebedev, his co-defendant, have little left to bargain with: Yuganskneftegaz, Yukos's main production arm, has already been renationalised as part of a parallel corporate tax case. The legal choreography over the firm's remaining assets suggests they are heading the same way.

From the defendants' perspective, the most benign interpretation is that Mr Putin's annual address to parliament on April 25th - in which he called for an independent judiciary, and told the tax authorities to stop “terrorising” business - implied a new decision to acquit them on at least some of the charges they face for fraud, embezzlement, tax evasion and running a criminal organisation. Or perhaps the sentences will still be harsh, but it would just have grated too much to have them handed down so soon after the speech.

Was one of the three judges ill? Or was the real, mundane explanation simply that it was taking them longer than expected to write their verdicts? The most popular theory was that Mr Putin has delayed the judgment till after VE Day on May 9th, at which senior western visitors to Moscow might have asked awkward questions. The new date is May 16th.

Garry Kasparov, a chess champion turned politician, also mentioned the potential for embarrassment during Mr Putin's visit to Israel. Relations with Israel, the adopted home of Leonid Nevzlin, another Khodorkovsky lieutenant who has fled Russia, have already been strained by Mr Putin's approval of arms sales to Syria.

But if those are the reasons, why set the April 27th date in the first place? The world and his wife were invited to Moscow for May 9th months ago. Handing down the verdicts in advance had seemed to imply a ballsy Kremlin decision to face down foreign criticism about Russia's “internal affairs”. Outside the court, as the defendants' lawyers and relatives came and went, no one seemed the wiser.

Perhaps a twist should have been expected at the end of what has been a surreal legal campaign. The trial took place in a tiny courtroom, with Mr Khodorkovsky and Mr Lebedev sitting in a cage, and the judges intermittently staring into space. Just as bizarrely, Yuganskneftegaz was sold in a rigged auction for $9.4 billion to an unknown company, whose registered address happened to be shared with a provincial grocery. While it lays bare the authoritarianism of Mr Putin's regime, this farrago has also shown something just as troubling: shambolic incompetence.