Putin to release rival oligarch

Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

Vladimir Putin said yesterday he would pardon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former oligarch who has languished in jail on tax evasion and embezzlement charges since challenging the President's authority a decade ago, as he announced a raft of amnesties before the Sochi Winter Olympic games.

Khodorkovsky, who is widely viewed as Putin's most prominent foe, joins a number of high-profile prisoners, including the Pussy Riot members Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina, who will be released ahead of the February Games.

"He has served more than 10 years, that is a serious term, I think that a decision must be made [on a pardon]," Putin said in apparently off-the-cuff comments at the end of a four-hour press conference.

Khodorkovsky had never before submitted an appeal for clemency, but had "written such a document very recently", Putin said.

A source close to Khodorkovsky told the Daily Telegraph that the former oligarch appealed for a pardon because his 79-year-old mother Marina had cancer. The source, who asked not to be named, added that if the petition was successful it should be granted in the next few days.

The surprising announcement caused confusion in Khodorkovsky's own camp, with defence lawyers initially denying that either they or their client had made any such appeal.

But they later issued a statement retracting all comments until Khodorkovsky had spoken to his lawyers.

Khodorkovsky, currently an inmate of Prison Colony No 7, a remote camp north of the Arctic Circle in Karelia, was one of the original "oligarchs" to amass fabulous wealth and power in the rough-and-tumble privatisations of state property that followed the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s.

Starting out as a small entrepreneur running a cafe, he quickly rose to control his own bank, Menatep, through which he acquired control of Yukos, Russia's largest oil company.

But when Putin arrived in the Kremlin determined to curb the power of the oligarchs, the two men found themselves on a collision course over management of the oil and gas sector and governance of the country - with Khodorkovsky increasingly looking like a potential rival for the presidency.

By late 2003, the relationship between the two men was at breaking point, and on October 25 that year a convoy of special forces surrounded Khodorkovsky's private jet on the tarmac at Novosibirsk airport and arrested him at gunpoint.

He was subsequently sentenced to nine years for tax evasion after a controversial trial in 2005. In 2010, he received a second 12-year sentence on charges of embezzling a vast amount of oil. That was later reduced on appeal and Khodorkovsky was due to finish his term in August next year.

Putin said the 30 Greenpeace activists, including two New Zealanders, arrested by after a protest at a Russian oil rig in January would also be going home - although he added that he hoped their ordeal in jail had "taught them a lesson".