The hearing of Khodorkovsky and Lebedev’s lawyers’ joint appeal has been adjourned.

Today Chita Regional Court adjourned without explanation the hearing of the joint appeal by Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev’s defence which was set for 10 o’clock this morning.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev had expressed their desire to take part in today’s session – a video conference link with them was to be held from Chita pretrial detention centre. In lawyer Alexei Miroshnichenko’s opinion, as confided to the Interfax-Siberia agency, Chita Regional Court must have made the decision to adjourn the hearing at the last moment, otherwise Khodorkovsky and Lebedev would not have been left today in the pretrial detention centre, they would have been taken as usual to the public prosecutor’s office for familiarisation with the materials of the second criminal case. “Most likely the court was not ready to make a decision,” the lawyer summed up.

The lawyers filed the joint appeal after Ingodinsk district court on 1 August sent the joint appeal against the action (or inaction) and decision of investigators back to Khodorkovsky, Lebedev and their defence. The appeal cites examples of how the investigation consistently and methodically ignored all the vindicatory evidence of the defence. For example, investigator A.V. Akimov, in defiance of the law and the decisions of the Russian Federation Constitutional Court, believes it possible to formulate the following procedural passages: “Proof is exercised only by power-wielding persons in criminal proceedings, and therefore the defence has no right to gather evidence.” The appeal also noted that the investigation continues to gather evidence secretly, refuses to question witnesses of the defence and hides from lawyers and the accused a whole host of highly important materials (for example, the electronic accounting basis of NK Yukos plc and its subsidiaries). “Instead of gathering evidence for the present case, they have carried out manipulations,” the authors of the appeal accuse the investigation.

As concerns the lawyers’ appeal, today it was sent to the court of first instance for processing.