FROM LEGAL EAGLE TO DYING IN A CAGE
By Alexander Osipovich
The Moscow Times, Russia
Feb 7 2008
A Harvard-trained lawyer, Vasily Aleksanyan was once a high roller
who drove around Moscow in a Mercedes-Benz luxury SUV.
Now he spends his days in the Matrosskaya Tishina detention facility,
and doctors say he "could die any day," according to one of his
lawyers.
Aleksanyan was hunched over and visibly exhausted as he sat in the
defendant’s cage at Simonovsky District Court this week. His appearance
was not surprising for a man who has been diagnosed with AIDS and
cancer, and who had been held in jail for nearly two years before
his trial on charges of embezzlement and tax evasion began Tuesday.
Following an outcry from activists and repeated requests from the
European Court of Human Rights, Aleksanyan’s trial was put on hold
Wednesday — but judges sent the former Yukos vice president back to
his prison hospital, overruling objections from his defense team and
officials at the prison itself.
It was the latest blow to a man whose career has plummeted from
spectacular heights.
Friends and colleagues describe Aleksanyan, 36, as having a sharp
legal mind, a deep sense of loyalty and a willingness to take big
risks when circumstances demanded it.
Aleksanyan was born into a highly educated Moscow family in 1971. His
father, a physicist, was an ethnic Armenian who had lived in Moscow
since the 1950s, while his mother was Russian. They now live in
southwest Moscow.
Anton Drel, a longtime friend and colleague, described Aleksanyan’s
family as "intellectual" and said his father had spent his life
preoccupied with science.
"I lost my own father when I was young, and I can say that many people
would be lucky to have such a father," said Drel, who is best known
as a lawyer for jailed oil billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
Aleksanyan also has two brothers. The elder works for Troika Dialog
investment bank, while the younger works for the Reuters news agency.
Aleksanyan wrapped up his education quickly, graduating from the law
department of Moscow State University in 1993 and going on to Harvard
Law School for an LL.M. degree, a one-year program popular with
international students. When he left Harvard in 1995, he was only 25.
While still a student at Moscow State University, Aleksanyan proved his
courage and his sharp negotiation skills in a 1992 incident remembered
by another longtime friend and colleague, U.S. citizen David Godfrey,
who met Aleksanyan while visiting Moscow on a student exchange program.
Godfrey, Aleksanyan and several other people were drinking in the
bar of the Hotel Sport in southern Moscow when a few thuggish-looking
Chechens came up to them and started hitting on the girls in the group,
said Godfrey, a lawyer who heads Yukos Finance, a Dutch subsidiary
of the oil company.
Aleksanyan began an "animated negotiation" with the Chechens, affecting
a Caucasus accent and stressing their shared roots to get on their
good side, Godfrey said.
The girls were spirited away to safer territory, and ultimately no
bar fight broke out. "It was a highly impressive and very dangerous
and bold attempt to protect people he barely knew at all," Godfrey
said by telephone from Hawaii.
Godfrey has lived outside Russia ever since coming under investigation
by the Prosecutor General’s Office, which accuses him and three other
foreign Yukos managers of siphoning $10 billion of Yukos assets out of
the country via a Dutch-based foundation. The managers deny wrongdoing.
After graduating from Harvard, Aleksanyan returned to Russia and
worked briefly at SUN Group, an international investment company.
In 1996, he left SUN and signed on with the rapidly growing business
empire of Khodorkovsky, the powerful oligarch who had made a fortune
in controversial privatization deals. Aleksanyan would head Yukos’
legal department until 2003.
Aleksanyan again showed his negotiation skills at his job interview,
Godfrey and another former Yukos colleague said.
When Khodorkovsky offered Aleksanyan the job, the lawyer countered
with a list of demands. The most important one was direct access to
Khodorkovsky — something Aleksanyan felt he needed in order to do
the job.
"Since Yukos was a huge company and he was quite young, he understood
perfectly well that he would be surrounded by many people with their
own interests," the colleague said.
"To create a transparent company, he knew he needed access to its No.
1 official," he said. The colleague, a longtime friend, asked to
remain anonymous because he did not want to get involved with the
publicity surrounding Aleksanyan’s trial.
Fyodor Savintsev / Itar-Tass Aleksanyan, right, and Drel leaving a
Khodorkovsky court hearing in 2004.
Both Godfrey and the colleague described Aleksanyan as a key player
in the push to transform Yukos into a transparent company and a
standard-bearer for Western business values in Russia.
Of course, being the top lawyer at Russia’s biggest oil company was
also highly lucrative.
>>From 1998 to 2004, Aleksanyan had six cars registered in his name:
a Mercedes-Benz G-500 sport utility vehicle, a Porsche 911 sports
car and an Audi A8 sedan, as well as a BMW X5, a Mitsubishi Pajero
and another Mercedes of unclear model, according to an online Moscow
traffic police database.
The lawyer was also courted by another oligarch, Roman Abramovich,
then-head of the Sibneft oil company, Godfrey and the colleague said.
When Abramovich and Aleksanyan had a face-to-face meeting in the
late 1990s, the billionaire showed the lawyer a suitcase containing
$1 million in cash and told him that it would be his signing bonus
if he agreed to join Abramovich’s team that very day, Godfrey and the
colleague said, recounting a story that they had heard from Aleksanyan
himself. Aleksanyan turned down the offer.
A spokesman for Abramovich did not immediately respond to an e-mailed
request for comment.
In 2003, the year the state began its legal assault on Yukos,
Aleksanyan formally stepped down from his position as the head of
Yukos’ legal department but continued to work as a personal lawyer
for Khodorkovsky and fellow Yukos shareholder Platon Lebedev.
Things went rapidly downhill for Yukos. Over the next few years,
Khodorkovsky was sentenced to nine years in prison on charges relating
to an early-1990s privatization deal. The company was hit with massive
claims for back taxes and filed for bankruptcy. Its choicest assets
were snapped up by Rosneft, the state-owned oil company.
By early 2006, Yukos CEO Steven Theede was in London avoiding a
Russian criminal investigation and complaining that the remains of
the company in Moscow were answering to Rosneft rather than to him.
In a risky gambit, Aleksanyan agreed to return to Yukos as an executive
vice president and deal with its court-appointed bankruptcy manager,
Eduard Rebgun.
Until then, Aleksanyan had not been caught up in any of the numerous
investigations into senior Yukos officials. His appointment in March
2006 changed everything.
For two weeks, Aleksanyan was repeatedly called in for questioning by
the Prosecutor General’s Office, and he was continuously followed by
the same four cars, he said in an interview with Kommersant published
in April 2006.
He claimed that prosecutors were pressuring him to quit. "After I said
I would not leave Yukos, they told me with a smile that it was the
first time they had seen a person voluntarily asking to go to jail,"
he said.
Aleksanyan was arrested April 6, 2006, on charges of embezzlement
and tax evasion, and he has been in detention ever since.
When asked why Aleksanyan stayed at Yukos and did not flee Russia like
many other company officials, his friends offered several explanations,
including his tough character and an ironclad conviction that the
law would back him up.
"He has a rather strong character. … He is not afraid of anything,"
the colleague said. "And he did not feel any sense of guilt."
Godfrey noted that Aleksanyan had stood to benefit if the gambit
paid off. "He’s not stupid," the American said. "He’s a risk-taker,
but he’s not stupid."
A few months after his detention, Aleksanyan learned he was
HIV-positive. He also began to lose eyesight in his one good eye. The
other eye had been blind since a childhood accident.
Aleksanyan and his lawyers claim that the authorities used his illness
as a bargaining chip, threatening to withhold treatment unless he
agreed to testify against Khodorkovsky and Lebedev.
"He’s a very principled person, and he’s taken the position from
the start that he’s not going to give false testimony against other
people," said Drew Holiner, Aleksanyan’s representative at the European
Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
Investigators deny any unlawful treatment of Aleksanyan.
His health deteriorated to the point where he had full-blown
AIDS and other related diseases, including terminal lymphoma and
possibly tuberculosis, Holiner said. He added that Aleksanyan may
have contracted tuberculosis after being put in a crowded holding
cell with other inmates who had the disease.
Last November, Aleksanyan’s defense team got the Strasbourg court
to send Russia a request asking for Aleksanyan to be transferred to
a specialized AIDS hospital. Since then, the request has been sent
three more times, but it has yet to be carried out, which puts Russia
in violation of the European Convention of Human Rights, Holiner said.
"I’m frankly amazed that he’s survived this long," Holiner said.
Aleksanyan’s AIDS became public knowledge last month after Prosecutor
Vladimir Khomutovsky revealed it in a Supreme Court hearing. Until
then, statements from Aleksanyan and his lawyers had referred to
grave health problems but had refrained from specifics.
With his plight now a public spectacle, Aleksanyan has won a number
of supporters, including nine human rights activists who went on
a hunger strike this week to protest his treatment. "The Russian
government should be ashamed," Alexei Davidov, one of the hunger
strikers, said outside the courtroom Tuesday. "I don’t want to be
part of this lawlessness."
Not everyone has been sympathetic. A number of visitors to a
LiveJournal blog site said Aleksanyan’s sufferings were a just reward
for helping Khodorkovsky acquire billions of dollars worth of assets
in the 1990s.
After one visitor said it was "subhuman" to laugh at the terminally
ill, another one retorted: "People who are making their fortunes
by looting natural resources are also subhuman. But if you steal,
you should be prepared that sooner or later they’ll bust you."
Aleksanyan himself seems focused on other things. Speaking to reporters
in recent days, he has often turned from criticism of the Russian
court system to heartfelt discourses about faith.
"I can only put my hopes in God," Aleksanyan said in his defendant’s
cage on Wednesday. "Except for God, nobody can help me now. Do you
know what it says in the Old Testament? Put not your trust in princes."
Staff Writer Svetlana Osadchuk contributed to this report.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
