Yukos Lawyer, a Mother of Two, Gets 7 Years

Attorneys Say Prosecutors' Intent Was to Force Return of Executive in Exile

MOSCOW, April 19 -- A lawyer for the crippled Russian oil company Yukos was sentenced Wednesday to seven years in prison for tax evasion and embezzlement. Her attorneys and supporters contend the prosecution was designed to force another Yukos executive, currently in exile in London, to return to Russia.

Svetlana Bakhmina, 36, a mother of two young boys, was arrested in December 2004 as the government intensified the prosecution of executives at Yukos, whose founder Mikhail Khodorkovsky is serving an eight-year sentence in Siberia after being found guilty last May of tax evasion and fraud.

"We will protest the sentence, of course," Bakhmina's attorney, Olga Kozyreva, said to the Russian news agency Interfax.

Prosecutors, who had sought a nine-year term, expressed satisfaction. "I think that the court was able to sort out a complicated criminal case and made a fair decision," said one of the prosecutors, Nikolai Vlasov.

Yukos officials allege that the government's campaign against the company was designed to bring its substantial oil assets under state control and silence Khodorkovsky, who before his arrest was emerging as a political opponent of President Vladimir Putin.

Yukos has been largely dismantled by the state to secure what prosecutors said were billions of dollars in unpaid back taxes. Once valued at $40 billion, the company is barely alive and fighting further state and private claims that could drive it into bankruptcy.

Bakhmina's long-term detention before her trial drew widespread condemnation abroad from human rights and lawyers groups. They called for her release pending trial, saying that because she had two young children in Russia, she was not a flight risk.

For months after her arrest, Bakhmina was not allowed to speak to her two boys, ages 4 and 8. Russian officials relented only after a hunger strike by Bakhmina and an international campaign of letter-writing to Putin.

Bakhmina was arrested in connection with the investigation of alleged asset-stripping at a Yukos subsidiary several years ago when she was a junior lawyer at the company.

The Russian newspaper Kommersant, quoting unidentified investigators last year, said she would be released if Dmitri Gololobov, head of the Yukos legal department, returned from London, where he had fled. "If he is a gentleman, then he must return," the newspaper quoted an investigator as saying.

Many Yukos senior executives have fled Russia in fear of prosecution.

Bakhmina's lawyers have suggested that she could be released under an amnesty program for women with small children. The prosecutor's office would not discuss whether she would qualify.