Tycoon prefers jail to summer camp

Link : http://uk.news.yahoo.com/041025/80/f59jb.html


MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once Russia's richest man but now languishing in jail, thinks prison is better than the summer camps he visited as child, his mother has been quoted as saying.


An evening edition of the Izvestia daily on Monday quoted Marina Khodorkovskaya as saying her son, whose trial on tax evasion and fraud charges is widely seen as Kremlin punishment for his political ambitions, was healthy.


"Misha once told me that summer camp was worse. The space was similarly restricted, but there were no food parcels twice a week," she said in an interview with the paper.


"He has slept enough to compensate for 15 years. He asks for more nuts. They really like nuts in his cell for some reason. He is always saying they have the cleanest cell, he makes everyone maintain cleanliness."


Khodorkovsky, the main shareholder in oil giant YUKOS was arrested a year ago after a dramatic armed swoop by police on his private jet in the culmination of a legal campaign against YUKOS and its core owners.


Shares in his company have fallen more than 75 percent since his arrest, which provoked serious concern in the West that Russia was returning to authoritarianism, and YUKOS faces $8 billion in back tax bills.


Part of its main production unit may be sold off as early as November to pay off the tax debt in a move that will cripple it.


His mother said she was resigned to his arrest and ongoing trial, and compared it to the political arrests of the 1930s when Soviet dictator Stalin purged his opponents.


"For his wife it is, of course, very hard. It is easier for me and (his father), we understand what is happening, we remember the stories of people who lived through 1937."