Russia. Mikhail Borisovich Khodorkovsky is arrested for tax fraud. His company, Yukos, quickly loses much of its stock market value, until—a year after Khodorkovsky was sentenced to nine years in prison in 2005—it goes bankrupt, and its most important assets are acquired by the state-owned company Rosneft. In 2010, Khodorkovsky is convicted of embezzlement and money laundering, extending his imprisonment until 2017. Most analysts and international media consider his trial to be a political one, ordered by Vladimir Putin to get rid of one of the most powerful men in the country, who, before his imprisonment, had openly criticized Russia’s corruption. Amnesty International, denouncing the irregularities of the trials, has always considered Khodorkovsky a prisoner of conscience. Mikhail Borisovich Khodorkovsky (Russian: Михаил Борисович Ходоркгвский) was considered the richest man in Russia in 2003 (with an estimated fortune of $15 billion) and ranked 16th on the Forbes list of billionaires. Founder and leader of the anti-Putin organization “Open Russia,” recognized by the Russian government as a “foreign agent,” he later moved to London, where he declared: “I am no longer an insider of Russian power.”
