A Moscow court has sentenced Russia's former richest man Mikhail Khodorkovsky to 14 years in jail, in a verdict the defence said was ordered by Vladimir Putin.
Under the terms of the verdict, the sentence means the jailed Yukos oil company founder and his co-accused Platon Lebedev will stay in jail until 2017.
It means a key opponent of Mr Putin has been removed from the political scene for years to come.
The two, already serving an eight-year sentence from their first trial, do not qualify for a suspended term, judge Viktor Danilkin told the court.
The reading of the verdict in the packed courtroom was the culmination of the most controversial trial in Russia's post-Soviet history, which critics said was staged simply to punish Khodorkovsky for daring to oppose Mr Putin.
Lebedev was given an identical sentence.
'It's a cruel, shameful sentence which shows the absence of independent courts in Russia,' said Lyudmila Alexeyeva, one of Russia's top rights activists.
'An independent court would never have given such a verdict in this absurd case,' she told the Interfax news agency.
Taking into account time served since first his first arrest in 2003, the verdict means the two will stay in jail until 2017, Khodorkovsky's official website said.
'This is not a sentence, this is a case of lawlessness,' defence lawyer Yury Shmidt told reporters after the sentence which he vowed to appeal. 'There was pressure from the executive branch which is now headed by Putin.'
Judge Danilkin earlier this week convicted the pair in their second trial on money laundering and embezzlement charges, a verdict condemned by the US and other European countries as selective prosecution.
'The correction of Khodorokvsky and Lebedev is possible only by way of their isolation from society,' the judge told the court.
Khodorkovsky has been in prison since being snatched off his private jet by Russian security agents in October 2003. His supporters have always alleged he was punished for daring to finance the opposition to then president Putin.
The founder of Russia's largest oil company was convicted on tax evasion and other charges in 2005 and sentenced to serve time in a Siberian jail until 2011.
In the new trial, he was charged with embezzling 218m tonnes of oil from his Yukos oil giant between 1998 and 2003 and laundering 487bn rubles ($16bn) and $7.5bn received from the oil.
The defence called the charges utterly absurd since the amount of oil said to have been embezzled would be equivalent to the entire production of Yukos in that period.
Danilkin had earlier added to the string of other crimes attributed to the jailed tycoon by saying Khodorkovsky had broken the law by filing some of his financial reports in English only.
The verdict had been largely expected even before Mr Putin used a national television broadcast to affirm that a ‘thief must be in jail’, comments many interpreted as a direct order for the court to convict Khodorkovsky again.
