On December 30 2010, Judge Victor Danilkin found Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev guilty under Article 160 para. 3 (a) and (b) (embezzlement) and Article 174.1 para. 3 (money laundering)of the RF Criminal Code. He sentenced them to a total term of 13 years and 6 months, with a final sentence of 14 years in the colony, which is exactly what the prosecution requested. The sentence will be counted from October 2003, meaning that Khodorkovsky and Lebedev will remain in jail until 2017. Khodorkovsky and Lebedev will remain in Matrosskaya Tishina prison until the verdict is in force. Responding to the sentence, Khodorkovsky said: “Lebedev and I have shown by example that you cannot count on the courts to protect you from government officials in Russia. The “Churov Rule” is alive and well. But we have not lost hope, nor should our friends.”

Vadim Klyuvgant, lead trial lawyer on the defense team for Mikhail Khodorkovsky, reacted to the sentencing outside the Courroom in Moscow:

VK (Vadim Klyuvgant): Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev have asked me to read you the following statement following the verdict. Here is their statement: “Platon Lebedev and I have shown by example that you cannot count on the courts to protect you from government officials in Russia. The ‘Churov Rule’ is alive and well. But we have not lost hope, nor should our friends.” That is all.

This is their statement. And now mine. “To all those who participated in, organized and executed this felonious lynching, I would like to wish that when they are on trial, the court trying them will be just as attentive and honest with regard to their arguments and the arguments of their defence as the Khamovnichesky Court was attentive and honest toward our clients’ and our arguments. This will happen, you can be sure of that; the only question is when.”

Question: Theoretically speaking, with these terms, when might they be set free?

VK: Like yourselves, I don’t have the text of the verdict. It hasn’t been given out to us, and will likely be given out to us only in January. I won’t be able to answer this question for you until we’ve had a chance to actually see all these numbers, letters, articles and so forth with our own eyes. The only thing I can say is what you heard the court say. The court has ruled to calculate the term of punishment from February 2007 and to credit the term already served under the first sentence to it – that part which has already been served. I’m merely repeating what the court said, as I heard it. Now, when we actually get the verdict, then we’ll figure out all this arithmetic. We will definitely be appealing. Moreover, we will be raising the question (in keeping with our position about how this is a felonious lynching and a falsified case), – we will be raising the question of the criminal prosecution of the perpetrators. All those established and unestablished persons in this whole organized criminal group which has been involved in their lynching. We’ll be holding a press conference in January (right after the new year’s vacation); we’ll speak more concretely about our plans there.

Question: Will Mikhail Borisovich and Platon Leonidovich be asking for a pardon?

VK: No.

Question: Criminal prosecution of whom concretely?

VK: All established and unestablished persons, this whole criminal organized group involved in their lynching.

Question: You said there’s going to be an address to Medvedev?

VK: I’d already said back then that I’ll announce the details later. This “later” has not come yet.

Question: Platon Leonidovich and Mikhail Borisovich are going to continue to be held in the investigative isolator?

VK: The <news> wires are already carrying the official information of the Federal Service for the Execution of Punishments that their place of location is not going to change until the verdict has entered into legal force. But this cannot be any other way, even without this announcement. Getting back to your questions – how to calculate the sentences, what they include, and how long. I would like to say that for us this is a secondary question. For a human life it is very important, no doubt about it. But it is secondary not because we underestimate this importance, but because even a single hour under this verdict in conditions of deprivation of liberty is a trampling on every law imaginable. This is exactly what is said in the statement I just read to you.

Question: What’s your assessment of the court’s assessment of the evidence…

VK: The court didn’t assess anything. This is a fake, that has only the outward appearance of a verdict. We are convinced that the court, and this judge concretely, is only nominally its author – on the strength of the fact that there’s a signature there. We are convinced that this is not the verdict of an independent court, and for this reason it’s impossible to speak about some kind of assessment, where one phrase contradicts another there. And this bears witness to the fact that this document there, if one can even call it that, has way more than one author. I don’t consider it possible to speak about some kind of assessment or analysis.

Question: The civil suits that the verdict talks about, can they mean that Khodorkovsky and Lebedev will become “non-exitable” [not allowed to travel abroad-Trans.] once they get out?

VK: Listen, the civil suits have been sent off someplace or other in the order of civil judicial proceedings. For now they’re still sitting in jail and we don’t know when they’ll get out.

Question: So if the judge is the nominal author of the verdict, then who is its real author?

VK: That’s what I think. And this is exactly why we want to initiate a criminal investigation, so that all the authors and the performers will be put in the spotlight. The same kind of spotlight as our clients are in now. This is what we’ll be aiming for.

Question: How will the investigation be organized technically?

VK: You take a criminal, you put him in jail under arrest and you investigate his criminal activities. If there are many criminals, then you put them all in jail and you investigate their criminal activities. How this is implemented is written in the CCrimPro [Code of Criminal Procedure].

Question: Are you assuming that a change of power will take place and that then it will be possible to do this?

VK: I didn’t say anything about a change of power. I was speaking about our assessments and our intentions.

Question: And how are you going to initiate it?

VK: We will initiate it with all the means provided to us by law.