MOSCOW - Russian judges strung out an apparently inevitable guilty verdict on oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky on Tuesday, adjourning their summing up in the heavily politicised fraud and tax evasion case for a second day.
The judges resumed reading out their lengthy findings on Tuesday morning, but the court later adjourned the hearing until Wednesday without a formal verdict or sentence on the former head of the YUKOS oil giant.
But it looked only a matter of time before the judges formally convict a man they say led an "organized criminal group," after a 22-month case that has scared off foreign investors and soured Russia's relations with Washington.
"The court has established guilt on all charges," Khodorkovsky lawyer Genrikh Padva told reporters during a recess in the summing up, which began on Monday.
The judges have already found that the 41-year-old billionaire, who is on trial with business associate Platon Lebedev, committed tax evasion and other serious offences.
The defense team says the outcome of the heavily-politicised trial is a foregone conclusion, with guilty verdicts on some or all of the charges certain to be handed down.
Khodorkovsky and Lebedev face seven counts of fraud, embezzlement, tax evasion and theft that have their roots in alleged deals during the murky days of post-Soviet privatisation in the mid-1990s. Khodorkovsky says he is innocent.
The prosecution is seeking a 10-year jail sentence for the two men.
Few ordinary Russians, who resent the vast riches made by a few "oligarchs" from the sell-off of state industries, have much sympathy for Khodorkovsky.
But the widely predicted way the court has acted is sure to revive claims by his defense that he has been the victim of a Communist-style "show trial" and prompt criticism that Russia's judiciary is under the Kremlin's thumb.
"The sentence has yet to come, but all the same we consider it illegal," another defense lawyer, Yuri Shmidt, was quoted as saying by Interfax news agency after the adjournment was announced. He said the case could go on for several more days.
The Kremlin is widely seen as having engineered the case against Khodorkovsky to remove him as a political threat and the affair has already rebounded on President Vladimir Putin's international standing.
Putin's chief of staff Dmitry Medvedev, indicating that Khodorkovsky was being used as an example to other oligarchs not to try to move into politics, has described the trial as "showcase" for other business leaders.
SECURITY STEPPED UP
Police stepped up security outside the shabby three-storey courthouse in central Moscow where hundreds of Khodorkovsky supporters had rallied on Monday.
On Tuesday morning, about 200 anti-Khodorkovsky protesters gathered, some unfolding banners saying "Khodorkovsky, return our money" and "Putin, protect us from Khodorkovsky."
More than a dozen buses and trucks with soldiers and police were parked near the court and crash barriers were set up.
Shortly before the adjournment, a group of some 30 Khodorkovsky supporters tried to break through the police cordon toward the court house, but were pushed back.
They carried portraits of the tycoon and posters with slogans including "Khodorkovsky is the pride of Russian business." Russian news agencies said about 10 protesters were briefly detained.
Khodorkovsky, watching proceedings with Lebedev from inside a metal cage in the courtroom, appeared calm and read for some of the time while the judges plodded through their conclusions.
Their tenor remained as it was on Monday -- that the two accused had headed an "organized criminal group" and were guilty of at least some of the charges against them.
While Khodorkovsky has been locked up, YUKOS has been crushed by a $27.5 billion back tax bill and dismembered by a state-imposed auction of its main production asset.
The United States, which has pressed Russia to improve its democratic credentials and its investment climate with a stricter observance of the rule of law, complained that Monday's summing up reinforced its concerns about the case.
"The conduct of the Khodorkovsky-YUKOS affair has eroded Russia's reputation and sapped confidence in Russian legal and judicial institutions," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said.
"We think it is in the government's, Russia's, interest to act to assure the world that the institutional weaknesses highlighted by this case are going to be addressed in a timely and direct manner."
Khodorkovsky was arrested at gunpoint 17 months ago in a raid on his private jet in Siberia, and has been held in an overcrowded Moscow prison.