Khodorkovsky Whips Putin in Switzerland
Filed under: Russia
Why is this man smiling? He's jailed Russian "oligarch" Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and he's happy because his brilliant, courageous legal team led by Robert Amsterdam has just won a major legal victory in a Swiss courtroom. As the Times of London reported:
Switzerland's highest court said that Russian legal proceedings against Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the jailed former chief executive of Yukos, were politically motivated and blocked the release to the Russian authorities of bank documents relating to the bankrupt oil company. The Swiss federal tribunal, in a landmark ruling, found that Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev, his associate, were victims of political persecution and it rejected a request for assistance by Russian authorities in their pursuit of tax claims against Yukos.
Russia's reaction? "We consider this decision politically motivated. This is a move of nonrespect toward our country and an attack on its sovereignty," Yury Chaika, Russia's prosecutor general, told a news conference.
So get this: the Kremlin rules out any possibility that the prosecution of Khodorkovsky, its chief rival for power, was in any way political, yet it has no problem in instantly proclaiming that the considered judgment of the highest legal institution in the world's most famous neutral country was motivated solely by political animus.
And the Kremlin never asks itself, assuming it is correct, what it might have done to engender such animus.
In other words, we see the neo-Soviet Union before us, fully realized, in all its horror -- utterly detached from reality and heedless of the consequences, formally so adjudicated by a major European tribunal.
The Swiss are "nonrespecting" Putin in exactly the same way that the British "nonrespected" Hitler and Martin Luther King "nonrespected" the KKK. In other words, they're showing maximum respect for the people of Russia, and of the world, whilst Putin digs their early grave.
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