Mikhail Khodorkovsky
Mikhail Borisovich Khodorkovsky, sometimes known by his initials MBK, is an exiled Russian businessman, oligarch, and opposition activist, now residing in London. In 2003, Khodorkovsky was believed to be the wealthiest man in Russia, with a fortune estimated to be worth $15billion, and was ranked 16th on Forbes list of billionaires. He had worked his way up the Komsomol apparatus, during the Soviet years, and started several businesses during the period of glasnost and perestroika in the late 1980s. In 1989, he became Chairman of the Board of Bank Menatep, which he founded. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, in the mid-1990s, he accumulated considerable wealth by obtaining control of a number of Siberian oil fields unified under the name Yukos, one of the major companies to emerge from the privatization of state assets during the 1990s.
In 2001, Khodorkovsky founded Open Russia, a reform-minded organization intending to "build and strengthen civil society" in the country. In October 2003, he was arrested by Russian authorities and charged with fraud. The government of President Vladimir Putin then froze shares of Yukos shortly thereafter on tax charges. Putin's government took further actions against Yukos, leading to a collapse of the company's share price and the evaporation of much of Khodorkovsky's wealth. In May 2005, he was found guilty and sentenced to nine years in prison. In December 2010, while he was still serving his sentence, Khodorkovsky and his business partner Platon Lebedev were further charged with and found guilty of embezzlement and money laundering. Khodorkovsky's prison sentence was extended to 2014. After former German minister for foreign affairs Hans-Dietrich Genscher lobbied for his release, Putin pardoned Khodorkovsky, releasing him from jail on 20 December 2013.
There was widespread concern internationally that the trials and sentencing were politically motivated. The trial was criticized abroad for the lack of due process. Khodorkovsky lodged several applications with the European Court of Human Rights, seeking redress for alleged violations by Russia of his human rights. In response to his first application, which concerned events from 2003 to 2005, the court found that several violations were committed by the Russian authorities in their treatment of Khodorkovsky. Despite these findings, the court ultimately ruled that the trial was not politically motivated, but rather "that the charges against him were grounded in 'reasonable suspicion'". He was considered to be a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International.
On being pardoned by Putin and released from prison at the end of 2013, Khodorkovsky immediately left Russia and was granted residency in Switzerland. At the end of 2013, his personal estate was believed to be worth, as a rough estimate, $100–250 million. At the end of 2014, he was said to be worth about $500 million. In 2015, he moved to London. In December 2016, the Dublin District Court unfroze $100m of Khodorkovsky's assets that had been held in the Republic of Ireland.
In 2014, Khodorkovsky re-launched Open Russia to promote several reforms to Russian civil society, including free and fair elections, political education, protection of journalists and activists, endorsing the rule of law, and ensuring media independence. He was described by The Economist as "the Kremlin's leading critic-in-exile".
Early years and entrepreneurship in Soviet Union
Early life and education
Khodorkovsky's parents, Boris and Marina Khodorkovsky, were engineers at a factory making measuring instruments in Moscow. Khodorkovsky's father is Jewish, and his mother was Orthodox Christian. They were both opponents of communism, though they kept this from their son, who was born in 1963. Having experienced a rise in state anti-Semitism and the death of Stalin, the Khodorkovskys were part of a generation of well-educated Soviets who were silently supportive of dissidents.The family were moderately well off, living in a two-room flat in a concrete block in the suburbs of Moscow. Masha Gessen wrote that they faced a dilemma raising Mikhail: “Speak your mind about the Soviet Union and risk making your child miserable, with the constant need for doublethink and doublespeak, or try to raise a contented conformist. They chose the second path, with results that far exceeded their expectations. Mikhail became a fervent Communist and Soviet patriot, a member of a species that had seemed all but extinct."
The young Khodorkovsky was ambitious and received excellent grades. He became deputy head of Komsomol at his university, the D. Mendeleev University of Chemical Technology of Russia, from which he graduated with a degree in chemical engineering in 1986. While in college, Khodorkovsky married a fellow student, Yelena. They had a son, Pavel. In 1986, he met an 18-year-old, Inna, a student at the Mendeleev Institute who was a colleague of Khodorkovsky's at the Komsomol organization. He courted her and slept in his car until she took him in. They had a daughter and twin sons. He and his first wife remained on good terms, and she would later take an active part in the campaign for his release from prison.
First business activities
After his graduation in 1986, Khodorkovsky began to work full-time for the Komsomol, which was a typical way of entering upon a Soviet political career. "After several years of working mostly to collect Komsomol dues from fellow students", noted Gessen, "he could expect to be appointed to a junior position in city management someplace far from the capital."But instead of following this path, he exploited "quasi-official and often extra-legal business opportunities" and began to make a business career for himself. With partners from Komsomol, and technically operating under its authority, Khodorkovsky opened his first business in 1986, a private café. The enterprise was made possible by the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's programme of perestroika and glasnost.
The introduction of perestroika enabled Khodorkovsky to use his connections within the communist structures to gain a foothold in the developing free market. With the help of some powerful people, he started his business activities under the cover of Komsomol. Friendship with another Komsomol leader, Alexey Golubovich, had a significant impact on his growing success, since Golubovich's parents held top positions in Gosbank, the State Bank of the USSR. Among the businesses in which Khodorkovsky "tried his hand" were "importing personal computers and, according to some sources, counterfeit alcohol." In addition, he "ventured into finance, devising ways to squeeze cash out of the Soviet planned-economy behemoth."
Menatep
In 1987, Khodorkovsky and his partners opened a Center for Scientific and Technical Creativity of the Youth. In addition to importing and reselling computers, the "scientific" center was involved in trading a wide range of other products. The opening of the center eventually made possible the founding of Bank Menatep.Employees of the Bank of New York, which was closely associated with Bruce Rappaport, worked very closely with his Menatep helping Menatep to list its stock in the United States. Natasha Gurfinkel Kagalovskaya, who is married to a former senior executive at Bank Menatep Konstantin Kagalovsky, supervised the Bank of New York's Eastern European business beginning in 1992. She had been a banker with Irving Trust since 1986 which was acquired by the Bank of New York in 1988. Vladimir Kirillovich Golitsyn or "Mickey" Galitzine had previously headed the Eastern European business at the Bank of New York and travelled for the first time to Russia in 1990.
He and his partners obtained a banking license, supposedly from money made from selling secondhand computers, to create Bank Menatep in 1989. As one of Russia's first privately owned banks, Menatep expanded quickly, by using most of the deposits raised to finance Khodorkovsky's import-export operations, which is a questionable
practice in itself. Moreover, the government granted Bank Menatep the right to manage funds allocated for the victims of the Chernobyl nuclear accident. Khodorkovsky said:
Many years later I talked with people and asked them, why didn't you start doing the same thing? Why didn't you go into it? Because any head of an institute had more possibilities than I had, by an order of magnitude. They explained that they had all gone through the period when the same system was allowed. And then, at best, people were unable to succeed in their career and, at worst, found themselves in jail. They were all sure that would be the case this time, and that is why they did not go into it. And I...I did not remember this! I was too young! And I went for it."
It was during this period that Khodorkovsky acquired the Yukos oil company for about $300 million through a rigged auction. Khodorkovsky subsequently went on a campaign to raise investment funds abroad, borrowing hundreds of millions. When the 1998 financial crisis struck Russia, Khodorkovsky defaulted on some of his foreign debt and took his Yukos shares offshore to protect them from creditors.