Moscow: A Moscow court on Monday found jailed tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky guilty in his second trial on charges of embezzlement in a judgement seen as a watershed in the country's post-Soviet history.
The court found Khodorkovsky and his co-accused Platon Lebedev guilty of embezzlement, the ITAR-TASS and Interfax news agencies reported.
They had been charged with embezzling 218 million tonnes of oil from his own Yukos company between 1998 and 2003 - a charge the defence team says is absurd.
Only a handful of reporters were allowed into the courtroom for the verdict and judge Viktor Danilkin then requested even those journalists to leave as the rest of the verdict was read out.
Once the country's richest man, now its most prominent prisoner, Khodorkovsky, 47, is already serving an eight-year sentence for fraud on charges his supporters insist were trumped up by the authorities.
But with his release scheduled for next year, Khodorkovsky was put on trial on charges of money laundering and embezzlement that could see the head of the now-defunct Yukos oil giant stay in jail until 2017.
The pursuit of Khodorkovsky has been the most controversial legal action of the post-Soviet era.
Khodorkovsky's supporters see him as a martyr punished for daring to challenge strongman Vladimir Putin by financing opposition parties but Russian officials view him as a corrupt tycoon who profited by breaking the law.
Hundreds of journalists and supporters of the fallen tycoon crowded outside the courtroom in central Moscow, with those allowed in surprised to discover that there would be no transmission of proceedings in the so-called press room.
