MOSCOW -- One year and three days after it began, the biggest trial in post-Soviet Russia ended Tuesday with a nine-year sentence for fallen tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, whose oil empire was broken up after he became a political challenge to President Vladimir Putin.
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In Washington, U.S. President George W. Bush criticized Khodorkovsky's trial in unusually blunt language aimed at a U.S. ally in the war on terrorism. "Here, you're innocent until proven guilty and it appeared to us, at least people in my administration, that it looked like he had been adjudged guilty prior to having a fair trial," Bush said.
While Khodorkovsky, once estimated to have a $15 billion US fortune, is widely unpopular as one of the "oligarchs" who became immensely wealth during the murky post-Soviet privatization of state industries in the 1990s, many Russians saw political motives behind his trial.
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Most analysts have interpreted the Yukos affair as essentially aimed at imposing government supremacy over business after a decade in which big business, epitomized by Khodorkovsky's empire, exploited the weakness of the post-Soviet state to amass ever larger fortunes.
In this, market watchers say, Putin's administration succeeded, at a heavy cost. "I don't think any of the big business groups will want to take on the Kremlin openly now," Roland Nash, head of research with Renaissance Capital, told Dow Jones Newswires.
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