Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
AFP
Moscow
Russian investigators have summoned Kremlin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky for questioning over a 1998 murder, the website of the former head of Yukos oil company said yesterday.
Investigators on Monday handed Khodorkovsky’s father a summons for his son to come in for questioning in Moscow this Friday, said Open Russia, an opposition news website created by Khodorkovsky, publishing a scan of the document.
The statement by the powerful Investigative Committee said that Khodorkovsky was “charged” over the murder of a Siberian mayor in 1998 for which his former security chief is serving life in jail.
Khodorkovsky, formerly Russia’s richest man, spent a decade in prison on charges of tax evasion, fraud and embezzlement, which he blames on a political vendetta by President Vladimir Putin.
In late 2013 he was unexpectedly released and flown out of the country after a presidential pardon. He currently lives in London.
“It’s as if they don’t know my address,” Khodorkovsky tweeted, calling the summons “a sad attempt at changing the topic of debate” in Russia.
In a later tweet, he posted another letter from the Investigative Committee saying he will only be formally charged on Friday, suggesting the authorities had got ahead of themselves.
“They’ve remembered that they have to charge me first,” he wrote.
It was not clear whether he would be charged with masterminding the murder or a lesser offence.
Putin has claimed that Khodorkovsky has “blood up to his elbows”, alluding to involvement in violent crime, but went on to issued him with a pardon in 2013, seen by some as a publicity gesture ahead of the Sochi Winter Olympic Games in 2014.
Asked yesterday why Putin pardoned the tycoon despite allegations of involvement in the mayor’s murder, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said yesterday that at the time there was “some information” but investigators now have a more complete case.
“We did not have some of the information that we have now, which led to the actions being taken by the investigators,” Peskov told journalists.
Investigators announced in June that they were reopening a criminal probe into the 1998 murder of Vladimir Petukhov, the mayor of oil-producing city Nefteyugansk, saying that Khodorkovsky may have ordered the killing.
State television has covered the new development in the case, with Rossiya 24 channel even interviewing the widow of the mayor.
“We’ve been waiting for this for 17 years,” she told the channel, which alleged that the mayor was killed because he opposed tax evasion by Yukos.
Khodorkovsky’s associate, Alexei Pichugin, the former security chief of Yukos, was convicted of the murder in 2007 and given a life sentence.
Russian investigators in August called Khodorkovsky’s elderly father in for questioning as a witness over the case.
Khodorkovsky’s spokeswoman Kulle Pispanen said the latest steps by investigators looked like an attempt at revenge.
“It looks like payback for publication of materials of the ‘Spanish case’ about mafia among Russian leadership,” she wrote yesterday.
