Conviction
Lebedev was convicted of tax evasion in 2005, and sentenced to nine years in prison. He was subsequently charged with embezzlement and money laundering in 2009, and pled not guilty to the charges. There has been speculation that these charges were politically motivated. On December 27, 2010, Lebedev and Mikhail Khodorkovsky were sentenced again, and will likely spend several more years in jail. "A short prison sentence might be considered a victory for Mr. Putin’s protégé, President Dmitri A. Medvedev, a former law professor who is thought of as less of a hard-liner. Mr. Medvedev has been promoting policies to modernize Russia, and analysts say the Khodorkovsky case is an obstacle toward convincing foreign investors that the country’s legal system is fair."
On 24 May 2011, Lebedev and Khodorkovsky were named prisoners of conscience by Amnesty International, which criticized the men's second trial and called for their release on the expiry of their initial sentences.
On 7 August 2012, Lebedev's 13-year sentence was reduced by 3 years and 4 months by a district court judge in the Arkhangelsk region city of Velsk, where Lebedev is imprisoned. This action came as a result of the prosecutor's office requesting a re-qualification of Lebedev's offenses due to the passage of a new legal statute in the Russian Criminal Code which reduced the punishment for offenses of which he had been convicted.
Read more about this topic: Platon Lebedev
Famous quotes containing the word conviction:
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
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“... the truth is hidden from us. Even if a mere piece of luck brings us straight to it, we shall have no grounded conviction of our success; there are so many similar objects, all claiming to be the real thing.”
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