MOSCOW, August 6 (RIA Novosti) – Russia’s Supreme Court ruled to slash jail terms for the jailed former head of oil giant Yukos Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his former business partner to 10 years and 10 months at their Tuesday appeal. The decision means that they will be released two months early.
Khodorkovsky's term will now end in August 2014 and his business partner Platon Lebedev's in May the same year.
In 2010, a Moscow district court sentenced the two men to 14 years in prison on fraud and embezzlement charges. However, the Moscow City Court later reduced their sentences.
Lebedev had already spent ten years and one month in jail, and Khodorkovsky had been behind bars for nine years and eight months, RAPSI legal news agency reported.
The case against the two businessmen became one of that decade’s most high-profile legal cases in Russia, and was widely criticized by human rights groups as politically motivated.
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