Russian judges strung out an apparently inevitable guilty verdict on oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky today, 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 this 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 "organised 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 yesterday.
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 defence 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 defence 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 defence 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.
Mr 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.