<p><br /> A Russian judge has pronounced Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his business partner Platon Lebedev guilty of embezzlement at the end of the jailed former oil tycoon's politically charged second trial.<br /> </p><p><br /> The judge said the two men were also guilty of laundering stolen oil funds.<br /> </p><p><br /> The accusation of stealing oil from his now-defunct company Yukos was the main charge against Khodorkovsky in a trial seen as a test of the Kremlin's will to impose the rule of law.<br /> </p><p><br /> Prosecutors have asked the judge to sentence Khodorkovsky to six more years in prison on top of the eight years he is serving now.<br /> </p><p><br /> Reading the verdict judge Viktor Danilkin said the court had established that Khodorkovsky and Lebedev "carried out the embezzlement of property entrusted to the defendants."<br /> </p><p><br /> Enclosed in a glass-and-steel courtroom cage, Khodorkovsky and Lebedev pointedly ignored the judge as he read out the widely expected guilty verdict, whispering to one another and reading books and documents.<br /> </p><p><br /> A crowd of a few hundred supporters outside the courthouse chanted "Freedom!".<br /> </p><p><br /> Khodorkovsky, once Russia's richest man and head of its biggest oil producer, is nearing the end of an eight-year sentence imposed in a fraud and tax-evasion trial that shaped Vladimir Putin's 2000-2008 presidency.<br /> </p><p><br /> In his new trial, prosecutors argued he stole $27 billion in oil from Yukos subsidiaries through pricing schemes. His lawyers dismiss the charges as an absurd, politically motivated pretext to keep him behind bars.<br /> </p>
