" Senior Pentagon advisor Richard Perle said Russia "should be excluded" from the Group of Eight (G8) industrial nations for its arrest at gunpoint of its top oil baron, it was reported. "Not one of the G8 countries would allow itself to behave in such a way with one of its leading businessmen," the US Defence Department advisor said of the arrest last Saturday of the head of the Yukos oil giant Mikhail Khodorkovsky in an interview published Thursday in the business daily Kommersant, warning that Russia was "heading in the wrong direction." Khodorkovsky, whose oil group is the centre of a wide-ranging fraud investigation, was surrounded by armed security forces in a dawn raid at an airport in Siberia while he was on a business trip and flown back to Moscow. He was charged on seven counts of fraud, including one of embezzling the state of more than one billion dollars, and imprisoned. The arrest has been widely seen in Moscow as politically motivated, with Khodorkovsky having financed opposition parties ahead of December 7th parliamentary elections. As quoted by Kommersant, Perle said he hoped "the US administration will not allow Russian companies to return" to Iraq, noting that Washington had "liberated the Iraqis from the monstrous regime of Saddam Hussein with which Russian had fruitfully cooperated for a long time."
2007-06-10
01:43:51
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