RUSSIA:Who he is: Born on June 26th, 1963, in Moscow, Mikhail Borisovich Khodorkovsky trained as an engineer and chemist.
In the late 1980s he was active in the Soviet Komsomol communist youth movement. He made his first money conducting market research and set up Menatep, one of the country's first private banks. His early career coincided with political upheaval in Russia, where a chaotic transition from communism to unruly capitalism involved violent property struggles but promised huge riches to those who came out on top.
His wealth: Mr Khodorkovsky headed oil major Yukos from 1997 to 2003, aggressively expanding the company to become Russia's largest oil firm. He controls 32 per cent of Yukos through holding company Menatep. Business journal Forbes estimated his wealth at $15.2 billion in 2004 but this was whittled down to $2.2 billion earlier this year after Yukos's main oil asset, Yuganskneftegaz, was auctioned off to pay a massive back-tax bill.
The charges: Mr Khodorkovsky was seized by armed police in October 2003 and has been in jail since then. He has been on trial alongside close associate Platon Lebedev and has been charged with seven crimes including fraud and repeated corporate tax evasion. He was told in December that he also faced a new money laundering charge.
Last week Russian prosecutors said that regardless of the verdict they would soon come out with a fresh set of unspecified charges against him.
Potential sentence: If found guilty, he could be sentenced to 10 years in a labour camp. The state has also demanded $1.7 billion in damages from him personally.
Khodorkovsky and the Kremlin: The charges against him are widely assumed to be part of a Kremlin campaign to strip him of his power base. He gave money to the Union of Rightist Forces and the pro-western liberal party Yabloko. His lobbying in parliament was seen as a brake on reforms to close loopholes in corporate tax laws.
Mr Khodorkovsky's arrest has become a cause celebre among those who view President Vladimir Putin as an authoritarian leader keen to stifle potential opponents. But it has received little sympathy from the majority of Russians, who missed out on the riches obtained during the murky privatisations of the 1990s.