Below is an exclusive translation of a breaking story from the Spanish press. First published in El Pais, and also covered by several other outlets, the story concerns Antonio Valdés-García, a Spanish-Russian dual citizen who says he was beaten and tortured by Russian investigators to force him to provide false testimony against Mikhail Khodorkovsky. It should be illustrative of the weakness of the state's case that they have to nearly murder Vasily Alexanyan, and now, allegedly beat this individual to within an inch of his life to produce false testimony against Khodorkovsky. It is a story that speaks for itself.
Spaniard accuses Russian police and prosecutors of forcing his false testimony against Khodorkovsky
Antonio Valdés-García, 38 years old, a Spanish-Russian dual citizen, is accusing representatives of the Russian government of pressuring, beating, and torturing him.
PILAR BONET | Moscow 23/04/2009
Antonio Valdés-García, 38 years old, of Spanish and Russian dual nationality, has become a potential and valuable witness for the Kremlin in its case against Mikhail Khodorkovsky to close ranks around the fallen former president of Yukos. From Madrid, where he is located after having mysteriously fled from the police and courts of Moscow, Valdés-García has accused the Russian state of pressuring, beating, and torturing him with the goal of obliging him to give false testimony against the oil magnate.
Born in Moscow as the son to a boy of the Spanish Civil War, Valdés-García ran Fargoil, a business corporation affiliated with Yukos and based in Mordovia - a tax haven created in the Boris Yeltsin era and abolished by Vladimir Putin. Prosecutors consider him a suspect of participating in schemes to steal earnings from the oil company.
In his seven-page missive, Valdés-García accuses Victor Kozlovsky, a civil servant in the Ministry of the Interior, and various prosecutors ordering him to be put under physical and psychological violence, and have him threatened in order to extract a false testimony in the summer of 2005. Valdés-García abandoned Russia for Madrid in 2003, the year in which the campaign of harassment and overthrow against Yukos was culminating with the arrests of its principals. However, according to him, from Spain he had telephone conversations with Russian authorities, who assured him that he would be converted from a defendant into a witness, if he would return and answer the prosecutor's questions.
"Following long negotiations," Valdés-García voluntarily returned to Russia in June 2005 to "re-establish his good name and reputation." But upon returning, he says, three investigators "exercised pressure over me in order to obligate me to admit guilt in the theft of money."
"They deceived me," he complains. "In reality in turns out that the investigation only wanted me to take the blame." Valdés-García was put under "State protection," a form of witness custody which has practically become a prison regime in the region of Moscow. "All week long I was under control by armed guards and was almost totally deprived of freedom of movement," he says, and denounces "systemic psychological pressure" and "direct threats" on behalf of the investigators and officials from the Ministry of the Interior.
"It was clear that the investigatory organs only wanted to use me against the principals of the Yukos company," he indicated. At the beginning of August, the "aggressive behavior" of Kozlovsky caused him "real fear." According to him, Kozlovsky "became enraged" and shouted at him that "he was a brutish ingrate." Then, he says, he lost consciousness as a consequence of a "strong blow to the face." "Because of the grave cerebral trauma it is very difficult for me to establish the circumstances of the beatings and torture," he writes. Among the symptoms he presented were concussion, broken bones and jaw, bruises, wounds and several lost teeth. On August 19, 2005, Valdés-García says that he tried to withdraw in writing from "State protection," as he already feared that "once again they would torture me or simply kill me."
Kozlovsky proposed to him "that he declare in writing that what caused all the injuries was an accidental fall from a window." Valdés-García admits that had signed the proposed document, because he had "no other way out." "Out of fear for my life I didn't go public with the coercion used to give testimony nor anything else about the torture," he explains. Yesterday the Prosecutor Valeri Lajtin said that it was inadmissible for Khodorkovsky's lawyers to cite Valdés-García in the trial and protested that he had caused his own injuries to himself in "an alcoholic stupor," and that there is a search and arrest warrant against him.
In December 2006 prosecutors requested 11-12 years of severe imprisonment for Valdés-García, and then he was able to escape on January 2, 2007, according to the Russian media, slipping past an armed guard of two policemen despite having to move along on crutches. Valdés-García did not reveal the circumstances of his escape, for which he may have had received help from his brother - with dual citizenship like him - and eventually a fake Spanish passport. Neither of these two hypotheses have been confirmed.
He thought that "they would leave me alone," he indicated. "I tried to forget about it as though everything that happened to me in Russia were a nightmare." But in January 2009, a case opened up against him in his absence. "The people who coerced and tortured me didn't want to forget about my existence," he said, and declared himself willing to testify in Spain before representatives of the Russian authorities.
