Alexey Pichugin

Alexei Vladimirovich Pichugin was born in the town of Orekhovo-Zuevo, part of Moscow Region, in 1962. He was the chief security official at the former Russian oil giant Yukos. In August 2006, Pichugin was sentenced, by a Moscow court, to serve 24 years imprisonment for conspiracy in several murders. [ [http://www.kommersant.com/page.asp?idr=529&id=698453 "Yukos Employee Gets 24 Years in Murders"] , "Kommersant - Russia's daily online". 18 August, 2006.] Following an appeal by Russian prosecutors and then retrial, the sentence was raised to a life term, in August 2007. [ [http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/08/06/europe/EU-GEN-Russia-Yukos-Murder-Trial.php "Russian court sentences former Yukos security officer to life in prison for murders"] , "International Herald Tribune". 6 August, 2007.] __NOTOC__

Early years

From his childhood Aleksey Pichugin looked forward to a military career, so after leaving school in 1979 he entered the Interior Ministry’s Higher Command School in Novosibirsk. Pichugin graduated in 1983 and was sent to the Interior Ministry’s unit for the Tula region.

Professional career

In 1986 Pichugin entered the KGB’s school in Novosibirsk. On graduating, he started his work for the Committee for State Security. From 1987 to 1994 Pichugin worked in the administration of the KGB’s military secret service.

Pichugin left the FSB with the rank of major, in 1994, after the restructuring of state security services. In total, he had spent 15 years protecting Soviet and Russian state interests through his membership of the military and the secret services.

On leaving the FSB, Aleksey Pichugin joined the security service of Bank Menatep. In 1998, when Bank Menatep became the holding company for Yukos oil, Pichugin was appointed as head of a section within Yukos's security department.

As head of Yukos’s internal economic security department, Pichugin's responsibilities were safeguarding the company’s properties and prevention of theft from its enterprises.

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. During interrogation at the FSB's Lefortovo prison, it is alleged that Pichugin was given drugged coffee and injected with an unknown substance, after which he could not remember anything. In the following weeks, he began to lose weight precipitously.

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.

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).

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.

European Court proceedings

In September 2007, Pichugin's lawyers made public questions from the European Court of Human Rights to the government of the Russian Federation. The questions refer to Pichugin's first criminal case concerning the disappearance of Tambov business persons, Sergey and Olga Gorina. The questions were drafted on 5 June, 2007, based on complaints from Pichugin and his lawyers, filed in Strasbourg.

As was reported earlier by lawyer Kseniya Kostromoina, the defence had called to the attention of the Strasbourg court the violations of Articles 3 (Prohibition of torture), 5 (Right to life, liberty and security of person) and 6 (Right to fair trial) of the European Convention of Human Rights.

Private life

Married at the time of his arrest in 2003, Pichugin has three sons. The youngest, Sergey, was born in 1998. His wife spent several years publicly defending her husband's innocence. They are now separated.

References

External links

* [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4393003.stm BBC article on conviction]
* [http://www.alexey-pichugin.com/ Alexey Pichugin Case]
* [http://lenta.ru/news/2007/08/06/life/]
* [http://www.rian.ru/incidents/20070806/70431118.html]