It has not been a good week for Yukos. The company and its CEO, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, have worked hard in the past to build a reputation for honesty as part of a purported New Wave of Russian businesses that play by the rules. At least, let's say that they have spent a great deal of money and consultants' time to say that this is so. Now, however, Platon Lebedev, head of Yukos majority shareholder Group Menatep, is under arrest on charges that he embezzled more than $280 million from the state. At the same time, the head of one of Yukos' security departments, Alexei Pichigun, has been charged with masterminding a double murder in 2002. This, most assuredly, is not the kind of image Yukos wants to project.

The charges way well be politically motivated, as is so often the case in Russia. Khodorkovsky, Russia's wealthiest man and, some say, would-be president, is a powerful person. As such, he has a lot of enemies. It is not impossible that someone in a high place decided for some reason to target the Yukos oligarch. Criminal charges are a powerful instrument to cast doubt on his reputation and, by extension, that of the company he heads at the sensitive moment when Yukos is about to launch a billion dollars' worth of unsecured Eurobond debt to finance its absorption of Sibneft.

If the charges are false, or — which is just as important in Russia, if they lack the institutional momentum to make them stick — we'll discover soon enough. And then Yukos will, by extension, emerge even more redoubtable than before.

But then again, if the charges are provable, if the evidence is convincing, and if this is demonstrated in a fair and impartial court decision, this would say more for the increased level of corporate accountability in Russia than all the moves toward transparency and pleasant-sounding words on the part of Yukos and its PR department ever could. It would mean that Russian society has reached a state where big business no longer lives above the law.

In the 1990s, when contract hits were common and embezzlement almost the norm, such deeds were usually performed with impunity. If Yukos or its employees really are guilty of malfeasance, and if they are taken to task for it, that will be a sign that there has in fact been a real sea change in the Russian business environment and that perhaps, just perhaps, President Vladimir Putin's words about a "dictatorship of law" really do pack a punch.

We understand why the political analysts at all the Moscow brokerage houses are so agitated. Just when the order books are overflowing with buy orders, the darling of the market could turn out to have a black mark in her past. As if we didn't know.

It wouldn't surprise us to learn that the charges are trumped-up, a politically motivated waft of hot air. On the other hand, it wouldn't shock us if they turn out to be true — like every other big Russian company formed during the tumultuous years of nomenklatura privatization, Yukos' past is a murky one, murky enough for Khodorkovsky and his minions to spend millions of dollars to deter local and international reporters from analyzing things too rigorously. The truth is for a court to decide — a real court interested in getting to the bottom of things, not a politically motivated show trial. It will surprise us if the matter gets that far.

All in all, what develops is sure to be of interest in determining the real state of Russia's much-ballyhooed changing business landscape. What is at issue is, at bottom, whether or not the "rule of law," or a reasonable facsimile thereof, has finally taken root in Russian soil. Is this a true attempt to hold wrongdoers accountable, or just another example of dirty inter-oligarch infighting? Only time will tell, and we intend to keep a close eye on what may be a litmus test for the relative success of failure of reform in Putin's Russia. And a "close eye" is the very phrase President Putin himself used at his June 20 press conference when he invited the state and the media to observe how he is handling the oligarchs for the welfare of the country.