Six more years for Russian oil tycoon

Judge Viktor Danilkin sentenced Khodorkovsky to 14 years after convicting him of stealing oil from his own company and laundering the proceeds.

The sentence, which was what prosecutors had demanded, will be counted from his 2003 arrest and include a previous term in prison. Khodorkovsky is in the final year of an eight-year prison sentence.

Vladimir Putin, now Russian prime minister, is seen as the driving force behind the unrelenting legal attack on Khodorkovsky, a political opponent who challenged him during his earlier term as president.

As he considers a return to the presidency in 2012, Putin appears unwilling to risk the possibility that a freed Khodorkovsky could help lead his political foes.

The outcome of the second trial exposes how little has changed under President Dmitry Medvedev despite his promises to strengthen the rule of law and make courts an independent branch of government.

"It's a very cruel and absurd sentence that proves the well-known fact that Russia has no independent courts," said Lyudmila Alexeyeva, a veteran rights activist and chairwoman of the Moscow Helsinki Group.

"An independent court would have acquitted the defendants and punished the investigators who concocted the charges."

Following a 20-month trial in Moscow, the judge convicted Khodorkovsky and his business partner Platon Lebedev on charges of stealing almost $30bn (20bn) worth of the oil that his Yukos company produced from 1998 to 2003 and laundering the proceeds.

Lebedev was also sentenced to 14 years.

Defence lawyers said much of the judge's verdict was copied from the indictment and the prosecutors' final arguments.

The defence called the charges ridiculous, saying they reflected a lack of understanding of the oil business, including the payment of transit fees and export duties.

Numerous witnesses, including current and former government officials, testified that Khodorkovsky could not have stolen what amounted to almost all of the oil Yukos had produced.

The charges also contradicted the first trial, in which Khodorkovsky was convicted of evading taxes on Yukos profits.

Danilkin's conduct during the trial had raised some hopes among Khodorkovsky's family and supporters that he would prove to be more independent than the judge in the previous trial, who openly supported the prosecutors. Those hopes were dashed as soon as Danilkin began to read the verdict.

"They must have tortured him to get him to say what he did," said Khodorkovsky's mother, Marina. "He has put his title of judge in shame."

Khodorkovsky had angered Putin by funding opposition parties in parliament, which at the time had the power to oppose Kremlin policies and influence the choice of prime minister. He also pursued his own oil export plans independent of the state pipeline system, and publicly questioned the appearance of Kremlin corruption.

The guilty verdict was widely condemned in the West as being driven by politics rather than the rule of law. The criticism, however, only angered Russia's government, which pointedly told the US and Europe to mind their own business.

The defence lawyers said they planned to appeal, a process that could take months, and in the meantime Khodorkovsky and Lebedev will remain in a Moscow jail.

After the first trial, Khodorkovsky was sent to a labour colony in eastern Siberia near the Chinese border, while Lebedev served the first part of his sentence in a prison above the Arctic Circle.