Sergei Guriev MOSCOW — A liberal Russian economist who has criticized President Vladimir Putin's policies says he fled Russia because of fears of losing his freedom on “very bogus grounds.” Sergei Guriev told the AP by telephone Friday that he wanted to escape pressure from a new criminal investigation around jailed oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once Russia's richest man. In a phone conversation from Paris, where he arrived on a one-way flight on April 30, Guriev said he feared he could share the fate of witnesses in two previous investigations into Khodorkovsky who were later charged and died in prison. “I don't see under what circumstances I can return,” he said. Investigators began proceedings early this year against the authors of an expert report commissioned by then-president Dmitry Medvedev in 2011, to which Guriev contributed, that criticized Khodorkovsky's conviction in late 2010 for embezzling oil. He had been imprisoned since 2003 on charges of avoiding taxes on the same oil. Khodorkovsky is due to be released early next year, and Russia's supreme court is to reconsider the verdict in the second case in August. His supporters fear, however, that investigators are preparing a third set of charges to ensure he remains in jail. According to investigators, the authors of the report had a conflict of interest because they had previously received money from Khodorkovsky. Guriev denied receiving money from Khodorkovsky's oil company, Yukos, once Russia's largest, or bank, Menatep. However, Guriev said that he did not consider that it would have been illegal to do so. Guriev began to worry when investigators interrogated him three times and searched his office, seizing hundreds of pages of documents and 45 gigabytes of emails dating back five years, on grounds he described as “extremely absurd.” Though Guriev is only a witness in the case, he said his shock at investigators' “lack of respect for the letter and spirit of the law” made him worry that they could name him as a suspect and take his passport away. — AP
