MOSCOW (AP) — Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has ordered the country's prosecutor-general to review the conviction of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former oil tycoon whose imprisonment was widely viewed as Kremlin punishment for his political ambitions.
The announcement by the Kremlin on Monday follows a meeting last month between the outgoing president and leaders of the wave of massive protests that arose in December. The protest leaders had asked Medvedev to pardon 32 convicts, including Khodorkovsky.
Khodorkovsky, once Russia's richest man, was arrested in 2003, convicted of tax evasion and sentenced to eight years.
His release from that sentence would have come a few months before Russia's presidential elections, which Vladimir Putin won Sunday. But in 2010 he was handed a second prison term for stealing from his own Yukos oil company.
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