Russia's Mikhail Khodorkovsky sentenced to six more years

A Russian judge ordered former tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky jailed until 2017 on Thursday after being convicted of theft and money-laundering, in a court case seen by the West as a test of the rule of law in Russia.

Moscow judge Viktor Danilkin granted the prosecutors' sentencing request and ordered Khodorkovsky to serve 14 years in prison, including his current eight-year term and counting from the day of his arrest in October 2003.

With Khodorkovky and co-defendant Platon Lebedev watching from a glass-walled courtroom cage at the close of a trial sharply criticised by the West, the judge said there was no way they could be reformed without "isolation from society".

Dressed in black, Khodorkovsky, whose previous sentence was due to end next October, stood stunned as Danilkin announced the sentence, which his lawyers said was made under pressure from Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

"May God damn you and your descendants," Khodorkovsky's mother, Marina, shouted at the judge's back as he hurriedly left the courtroom immediately after the sentencing.

Khodorkovsky had adamantly denied the charges, and supporters said the conviction made a mockery of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev's pledges to improve the rule of law.

"The sentence was clearly issued under pressure from the executive authorities, headed as before by Mr Putin," said Yuri Shmidt, a lawyer on the defence team.

"Putin signalled to the court who is the boss today and who today decides Khodorkovsky's fate and life," he said.

Russia said the trial was a matter for its courts and rejected as "groundless" US suggestions that the verdict resulted from selective justice.

In a televised talk with Russians on December 16, Putin said Khodorkovsky had blood on his hands and said "a thief must be in jail," evoking US financial schemer Bernard Madoff to suggest a 150-year sentence would be fitting if allowed by law.

The new sentence will stoke renewed accusations of selective justice and could strain Russia's ties with the United States and the European Union, which said the conviction raised questions about Moscow's commitment to human rights.

It will be seen as a blow to Medvedev, who has said independent courts are crucial to Russia's future, casting deep doubts on his reform promises and reaffirming Putin's role as the dominant decision-maker.

Khodorkovsky, once Russia's richest man and head of a major oil company, the now defunct Yukos, is in the final year of an eight-year sentence imposed after a politically charged fraud and tax evasion trial that shaped Putin's 2000-2008 presidency.

In the second trial, which dragged on in a drab courtroom for nearly two years, prosecutors said he and Lebedev stole nearly $30 billion in oil from Yukos subsidiaries through price mechanisms and laundered some of the money.

Khodorkovsky's lawyers dismissed the charges as an absurd pretext to keep him in jail.

They have vowed to appeal against the sentence, opening the door to a potentially divisive debate over his fate in the run-up to parliamentary elections next year and a 2012 presidential vote that could see the return of Putin to the Kremlin.

One of the young tycoons who built fortunes after the Soviet Union's 1991 collapse, Khodorkovsky fell out with Putin's Kremlin after airing corruption allegations, challenging state control over oil exports and funding opposition parties.

After Khodorkovsky's 2003 arrest, Yukos was bankrupted by back-tax claims and its top assets sold to the state, deepening Western concerns over property rights and the rule of law.

Supporters have cast the trials as part of a Kremlin-driven campaign to punish Khodorkovsky for challenges to Putin and strengthen the state's grip on oil revenues, the fuel for an economic boom that transformed Russia during his presidency.