Khodorkovsky -- Russia's former richest man who last month won a pardoned from President Vladimir Putin after more than a decade behind bars -- was in Israel this week for a meeting with Leonid Nevzlin and three other co-owners of his now-defunct Yukos oil firm.
The hush-hush trip raised immediate speculation that the 50-year-old Putin rival was devising a strategy for an unprecedented USD 100-billion damages suit that is tentatively set to be heard by an arbitration court in The Hague later this year.
Yukos was forced into bankruptcy and eventually dismantled by the Russian state in return for disputed back taxes comparable to the company's entire worth.
The former oligarch said in Germany days after his release that he no longer knew his precise wealth but estimated it in the millions of dollars.
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But Nevzlin said today that Khodorkovsky was not planning to claw back his old Yukos holdings nor actively pursue the record-setting damages suit against the Russian government.
"We are meeting exclusively as friends and are spending most of our time at the dinner table," he added.
Both Western and Russian supporters of Khodorkovsky believe the tycoon was first jailed for funding opposition movements to ex-spy Putin's increasingly dominant and authoritarian rule.
Yukos also openly fought Kremlin interests and became a Western investment darling by being the first to adopt US accounting standards -- a radical break from the opaque financial and ownership structures dominating the post-Soviet landscape.