Mikhail Khodorkovsky

The right to private property meant at the same time the right and duty to be personally concerned about your own well-being, to be personally concerned about your family's income, to be personally concerned about your future. This is hard work.

What's important to me now is to uphold my good name and achieve a fair court decision - the past cannot be recovered anyway.

Fortunes are made, and disappear, over the lifetime of a single generation. Today, a person in essence takes his wealth from society just for the duration of his or her lifetime. The next generation has to create it anew.

Large companies cannot finance political parties as their shareholders and employees have different political views.

As for the company, I did all I could from the very outset of this affair to remove Yukos and its employees from danger.

I knew President Yeltsin well. He would never have tolerated government officials demonstratively showing off the millions they acquired through corruption, the way it's done today.

I have always defended my convictions and what I believed to be the truth.