and its executive officers. The allegation claimed that the prosecuting authorities were not able to lay hands on the Yukos legal executive general counsel Dmitry Gololobov, and thus chose to prosecute Svetlana Bakhmina because she was the only legal officer they could find. The lawyer for the imprisoned Yukos chief executive Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Robert Amsterdam, a Canadian claimed after being expelled from Russia, and prior to the verdict on Ms. Bakhmina, that "the prosecution has admitted that she was a hostage of the Kremlin. They want the former general counsel back and they are using her as a pawn to get him back." It was claimed that the "victim" company – the Tomskneft oil company – has not filed any complaint and says, on the contrary, that it has suffered no such fraud. An article A Vicious Sentence by Mikhail Fishman, in Kommersant-Vlast in 2006 claimed: "This concerns the assets of Tomskneft-VNK, taken over by YUKOS. The management of VNK resisted the takeover; it used a technique that was widespread in the late 1990s - making up a fictitious debt for the company, so that VNK appeared to owe somebody $440 million. All the same, YUKOS succeeded in acquiring the controlling interest. It refused to pay the fictitious debt, and transferred the assets of VNK enterprises to offshore zones. When the state, a minority shareholder in VNK, called on YUKOS to account for the transfer, YUKOS explained that it was a safeguard against attacks on the company by the fictitious creditors. All the enterprises in question were returned to VNK ownership almost a year before the auction at which YUKOS bought out the state's remaining stake in the company - at a fair market price, as the state later acknowledged."Nevertheless, Tomskneft (contrary to its wishes and to common sense) has been declared a victim, the temporary transfer of assets has been defined as theft, and the lawyer who carried out the orders of the company's real owners has been identified as the mastermind of the operation." President Bush When President George W. Bush visited St Petersburg in July 2006, he was told about the case of Svetlana Bakhmina when he met with "embattled activists" in Saint Petersburg. Irina Yasina, head of the NGO Open Russia, "appealed to Bush to raise with Putin the case of Svetlana Bakhmina, 36, a former attorney at Khodorkovsky’s oil company…. Yasina called the allegations bogus".