Opinion of Mikhail Khodorkovsky

[Cubby]

Option 1 for me, he's a freedom fighter for trying to promote democracy in Russia and a political prisoner.

He is currently in prison at a former uranium mine (!) in Siberia, supposedly for some shady business deals in the 90's. His real crime was threatening the stranglehold over Russia that Vladimir Putin currently has.

Supposedly most Russians hate him, and they certainly love Putin. Its sad that Russians hate freedom.

[Middle-aged Europe]

Option 1 and 2... not sure about 3, but probably also true.

He's a criminal. The point is that criminals who support Putin end up in high positions in the government/economy, while criminals who oppose Putin end up in prison. He opposed Putin.

[MasterJedi]

Options 1 and 2

[Jake]

He's a businessman who broke laws. This is Ken Lay with a political following here. With that said, a government run by his type of oligarchs is preferable to Putin's boys.

[ag]

Like nearly every single resident of Russia he broke a lot of laws - it is impossible to survive in that country without doing so, since the legal system is designed to be able to convict anyone.  The tax system is designed on the assumption that nobody pays taxes in full: anyone who'd try to, would have to pay well over 100% of his profits.  The property rights are very unclear, and if you show me a Russian who's never paid a bribe, I'll show you a Russian who lives entirely of his potato plot in the countryside, never leaving it for any reason and who's never been to a hospital. Driving a car, visiting a doctor, taking most kinds of employment, doing mandatory government paperwork - all of this inevitably involves comitting prosecutable offenses (at the very least, it involves bribery). Almost all private-sector employees are committing a crime by virtue of receiving their wage, since, with an exception of a few large companies, no entrepreneur can afford paying them legally.  Most government employees in any sort of important position either accept bribes directly, or get semi-legal kickbacks from those who accept bribes (since otherwise they wouldn't be able to afford both working for the government and eating). No construction whatsoever in Moscow can occur without a personal bribe to the city's mayor. Still, even if the mayor is on board, every other oficial is going to ask for a bribe of his own. When Putin himself was deputy mayor of St. Petersburg in the mid 1990s he used to pay more for each of his daughters in private school tuition than he received in sallary (and he had never had a higher income before, so it wasn't savings).  Entering a clinic is dangerous for your health, unless you pay - illegally - each and every nurse separately every day (no nurse would come close to you, unless you do this, since she is getting a starvation wage from the hospital). And for every single traffic policeman bribes - that drivers have to pay irrespective of committing infractions - account for the bulk of their income.

Of course, in the process of becoming Russia's richest man Khodorkovsky did a lot of shady things. He started by taking over a big chunk of the property of the erstwhile Young Communist League and his takeover of some of Russia's oil assets wasn't entirely clean. The funny thing was that, actually, what exactly was technically legal or illegal at the time is still not clear. The ridiculous thing is, that because of the ineptness of Russian prosecutors he was convicted either for breaking laws that don't exist, or laws that didn't exist at the time he "broke" them. None of his business partners or employees have every been extradited to Russia from any country, since no reasonable court can take seriously the representations of Russia's prosecutors. On the other hand, in Russia they are prosecuting - and keeping in lengthy pre-trial detention - his lawyers, whose only fault had been to defend him in court.

Khodorkovsky started as a shady businessman, but by the time of his arrest he was running the cleanest and the most above-ground business in Russia, trying hard to attract foreign investment. It can be argued that at the time he was  one of the least criminal of Russia's enrepreneurs, big or small. He wasn't arrested and convicted because of any crimes he may have committed.