Mikhail Khodorkovsky

Mikhail Borisovich Khodorkovsky is a Jewish Russian oligarch and former Russian political prisoner.

Khodorkovsky (born June 26, 1963) was born in Moscow to a Jewish father who was a factory worker, Khodorkovsky graduated from the Mendeleev Institute of Chemical Technology, where he studied economics, and served as deputy head of the Communist Youth League, the Komsomol. With several partners from the Komsomol he opened a private coffee house in 1986, expanding to import and sell such goods as brandy and computers. By 1988, he had built up an import-export business that brought in $10 million a year.

In 1989, Khodorkovsky and his partners opened Bank Menatep, one of Russia's first privately owned banks. Highly successful, Menatep was the first Russian enterprise to issue stocks to the public since the Russian Revolution (1917). Its clients included many government services and ministries. Meanwhile, Khodorkovsky continued to expand his import-export empire. In 1995, Menatep won the bid to acquire a controlling interest in the state-owned oil company Yukos.

When the ruble collapsed in 1998, Menatep went under as well, losing its banking license and its shares in Yukos. By 2000, Khodorkovsky was back on his feet and back in control of Menatep and Yukos. In 2003, Yukos merged with the Sibneft oil company. With 19.5 billion barrels of oil and gas, the corporation owned the second-largest oil and gas reserves in the world, after Exxon Mobil. That year, Khodorkovsky ranked twenty-sixth on the list of the World's Richest People and number one as the wealthiest man in Russia.

On October 23, 2003, Khodorkovsky was arrested on charges of fraud and tax evasion. His dramatic arrest was carried out by 15 masked federal operatives and dozens of armed agents. In May 2005, he was sentenced to nine years' imprisonment and in October of that year he was sent to a labor camp. Concern quickly spread that Khodorkovsky's arrest, trials and sentencing were politically motivated and the process received international criticism for its lack of due process. Many organizations also claimed it was the result of anti-Semitism.

Khodorkovsky became eligible for parole after having served half of his original sentence, however, in February 2007, state prosecutors began to prepare new charges of embezzlement, leading up to a second trial which began in March 2009. On December 27, 2010, Judge Viktor Danilkin handed down a guilty verdict, convicting Khodorkovsky of stealing 350 million tons of oil and sentencing him to thirteen and a half years in prison, later reduced to 12 years.

In June 2011, Khodorkovsky was sent to prison colony No. 7 of Segezha, in the northern region of Karelia near the Finnish border.

On December 20, 2013, Russian President Vladimir Putin pardned Khodorkovsky and he was released from prison the same day.