Jailed Russian oil magnate announces run for parliament

MOSCOW -- Imprisoned Russian oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky said in a statement yesterday that he wants to run in a parliamentary election in December, a hopelessly quixotic ambition that nonetheless will rankle the Kremlin and keep his plight in the public eye, according to political analysts.

''I advocate the right of every citizen of Russia to freely announce: The present Kremlin regime has exhausted itself and its days are numbered," said Khodorkovsky, 42, in a statement on his website announcing his candidacy. ''A new generation of leaders must succeed [President Vladimir] Putin's disintegrating and decaying regime, a generation that has Russia's future in the third millennium in mind."

Khodorkovsky, once Russia's richest man and the founder of the Yukos Oil Co., was sentenced in May to nine years in prison for tax evasion and fraud in a politically charged trial that his supporters said was orchestrated to silence a Putin critic and remove a potential kingmaker in the opposition. Government officials deny the charge, saying they were simply prosecuting a rogue businessman.

Under Russian law, felons cannot run for parliament but Khodorkovsky can still legally seek public office because his sentence has not been finalized by a Moscow court of appeal.

The court last week scheduled a hearing for Sept. 14, which Khodorkovsky's lawyers said was an unusually accelerated schedule that seems designed to quickly endorse his conviction and squash his ambition to run for parliament; his desire to run has been rumored for weeks.

''The Moscow court is clearly in a hurry to have this hearing," said Karina Moskalenko, one of Khodorkovsky's lawyers. ''Somebody ordered them to have the hearing on the 14th."

Moskalenko said she and other attorneys have only filed preliminary motions and expected more time to wade through the 450-volume case file before writing their final appeals. She also said she didn't know how the judges hearing the case can render judgment when they have had so little time to read the voluminous record. The defense hasn't submitted its own finished arguments.

Khodorkovsky said he would run in Moscow's University district, a relatively liberal area where he might expect to draw healthy support if he got on the ballot, analysts said. A number of leading opposition figures have already said they would back him.