Arrest and Convictions in Russia
Pichugin was arrested in April 2003, for the alleged murder of Sergei and Olga Gorin in 2002. Sergei Gorin was a senior manager at Bank Menatep.
Pichugin was found guilty and sentenced to 20 years, on 30 March 2005, for the murder of the Gorins plus the attempted murder of Olga Kostina. Kostina was a one-time adviser to Mikhail Khodorkovsky (founder of Bank Menatep and the major Yukos stakeholder) who had since become head of the Moscow mayor’s office's public relations department. The verdict followed a closed-door trial in which the original jury was replaced and the star prosection witness was a multiple murderer serving a life sentence - a fact the jury was not allowed to know. The fact that the murder victims had no other known enemies other than Yukos, and they were all persons posing a serious threat to the organization, weighted heavily in the deliberations.
In August 2007 Pichugin was again found guilty, in a retrial at the Moscow City Court, of the murder of three people and of assaulting four more. He received a life sentence for organising the murders of:
- Valentina Korneyeva (a Moscow business owner who had refused to sell her property to Bank Menatep)
- Vladimir Petukhov, mayor of Nefteyugansk (who had insisted that Yukos pay local taxes in full) and
- Nikolai Fedotov, a chauffeur (killed during an assassination attempt on Evgeny Rybin). A previous attempt had been made upon Mr. Rybin's life as he left a birthday party for a Menatep top manager while he was suing the company in Stockholm Arbitration court.
Rybin, a manager at East Petroleum Handels GmbH. (based in Vienna), had filed a number of lawsuits against Yukos, claiming that they return US$100 million that his company had invested for the development of the Zapodno-Poludennoye and Krapivinskoye oil fields. Rybin's car was rigged with a bomb. He had stepped out to deliver flowers to his sister when the bomb went off..
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