Tweet
OBITUARIES: VASILY ALEKSANYAN
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/vasily-aleksanyan-2368062.html
Monday, 10 October 2011
Human rights activists said the former Yukos vice-president Vasily
Aleksanyan, who died on 3 October of Aids-related illnesses at the
age of 39, would have lived longer if the authorities had not kept
him in prison for nearly three years on trumped-up charges.
Aleksanyan fought a protracted legal battle with the authorities
before being freed on bail in 2009 to seek medical treatment. "It was
practically a murder," the activist Valery Borshchyov said. Supporters
of Aleksanyan and his former boss at the oil company Yukos, Mikhail
Khodorkovsky, believed that charges of embezzlement and tax evasion
against Aleksanyan amounted to punishment by the Kremlin for
Khodorkovsky's political and commercial ambitions.
Aleksanyan, who had served as Yukos's head lawyer, left the
company after Khodorkovsky's arrest in 2003 but returned in 2006
as an executive vice president to work with Yukos's court-appointed
bankruptcy manager. A month later, he was arrested, and a few months
after his detention, he learned he was HIV-positive. He also began
to lose eyesight in his one good eye; he had been blind in the other
since a childhood accident.
Aleksanyan and his lawyers said the authorities used his illness as a
bargaining chip, threatening to withhold treatment unless he testified
against Khodorkovsky and his jailed business partner Platon Lebedev.
"I was put in frightful cells, that recall the time of Stalin's
jailers," he told a Moscow court in 2008. "They are damp and filthy
and these people know my immune system is dead."
Born on 15 December 1971, Aleksanyan graduated from Moscow State
University before going to Harvard law school. He worked for the
American law firm Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, and in 1995 became
head of the legal department for the British investment firm Sun Group,
leaving a year later to head Yukos's legal department.
Following his arrest in 2006, international pressure grew to release
him on bail for health reasons - in addition to full-blown Aids and
his fading eyesight, he suffered from liver cancer, lymphoma and
tuberculosis. The Russian authorities three times ignored rulings
by the European Court of Human Rights, but finally, in 2008, he was
released with bail set at 50 million rubles but he was repeatedly
summoned to court, where he wore a face mask and could barely stand
up. The case against him was only dropped last year when the statute
of limitations ran out.
Aleksanyan "lived as if on a volcano" during his final years, Yury
Shmidt,a lawyer for Khodorkovsky, said. "He lived all the time in
such a state that if the slightest infection occured, he could die
in a second." A Yukos statement said that "Vasily was very talented,
one of the best persons in all regards, as a professional, leader
and as a friend."
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/vasily-aleksanyan-2368062.html
Monday, 10 October 2011
Human rights activists said the former Yukos vice-president Vasily
Aleksanyan, who died on 3 October of Aids-related illnesses at the
age of 39, would have lived longer if the authorities had not kept
him in prison for nearly three years on trumped-up charges.
Aleksanyan fought a protracted legal battle with the authorities
before being freed on bail in 2009 to seek medical treatment. "It was
practically a murder," the activist Valery Borshchyov said. Supporters
of Aleksanyan and his former boss at the oil company Yukos, Mikhail
Khodorkovsky, believed that charges of embezzlement and tax evasion
against Aleksanyan amounted to punishment by the Kremlin for
Khodorkovsky's political and commercial ambitions.
Aleksanyan, who had served as Yukos's head lawyer, left the
company after Khodorkovsky's arrest in 2003 but returned in 2006
as an executive vice president to work with Yukos's court-appointed
bankruptcy manager. A month later, he was arrested, and a few months
after his detention, he learned he was HIV-positive. He also began
to lose eyesight in his one good eye; he had been blind in the other
since a childhood accident.
Aleksanyan and his lawyers said the authorities used his illness as a
bargaining chip, threatening to withhold treatment unless he testified
against Khodorkovsky and his jailed business partner Platon Lebedev.
"I was put in frightful cells, that recall the time of Stalin's
jailers," he told a Moscow court in 2008. "They are damp and filthy
and these people know my immune system is dead."
Born on 15 December 1971, Aleksanyan graduated from Moscow State
University before going to Harvard law school. He worked for the
American law firm Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, and in 1995 became
head of the legal department for the British investment firm Sun Group,
leaving a year later to head Yukos's legal department.
Following his arrest in 2006, international pressure grew to release
him on bail for health reasons - in addition to full-blown Aids and
his fading eyesight, he suffered from liver cancer, lymphoma and
tuberculosis. The Russian authorities three times ignored rulings
by the European Court of Human Rights, but finally, in 2008, he was
released with bail set at 50 million rubles but he was repeatedly
summoned to court, where he wore a face mask and could barely stand
up. The case against him was only dropped last year when the statute
of limitations ran out.
Aleksanyan "lived as if on a volcano" during his final years, Yury
Shmidt,a lawyer for Khodorkovsky, said. "He lived all the time in
such a state that if the slightest infection occured, he could die
in a second." A Yukos statement said that "Vasily was very talented,
one of the best persons in all regards, as a professional, leader
and as a friend."