Presidential economic adviser Andrei Illarionov said Thursday that the onslaught against Yukos, which culminated this week in the conviction of its former CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky, had caused the country immeasurable harm and was changing the country's economic and political landscape.

"The Yukos affair has not ended. This is just the beginning, even though this has been going on for nearly two years," he said at a news conference. "Over this time, the case has dealt huge damage to our country ... and the scale of the damage is not yet known."

He said the case had wrought systemic change unseen in scale since the August 1991 coup and the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Khodorkovsky was sentenced to nine years in a penal colony on charges of fraud and tax evasion earlier this week following a yearlong trial and a two-year attack on his Yukos oil major, which has led to its partial takeover by the state as payment for $28 billion in back taxes.

Illarionov said the state's move to take control of the oil sector via its onslaught against Yukos was opening the way for a Venezuelization of the Russian economy, a path, he suggested, that could put an end to further economic growth.

The Venezuelan government in 1957 decided to renationalize the oil sector in what it believed to be a patriotic drive to rid what was a fast growing sector of U.S. imperialists and local oligarchs. Since that decision, he said, Venezuela's GDP per capita has fallen consistently every year, dropping a total 32 percent per capita since 1957. Other nations that later formed the OPEC oil cartel followed suit and also experienced a significant slowdown in economic growth as a result, he said.

"This would appear to be so attractive that we are trying to do it on Russia soil," Illarionov said. The state's attack on Yukos, which was once the fastest-growing oil company and the most attractive for investors because of its efforts to boost transparency, had reversed a trend for portfolio investment in the most effective and fastest growing companies into ineffective nontransparent ones seen as close to the state, he said. "This is the opposite of natural selection," he said.

"There has been a significant redistribution of funds into less effective companies," he said. As a result, he said, investment and oil production rates, which once were booming, are starting to reverse. Rapid growth in oil production, which made Russia the fastest-growing oil-producing nation in the world, has almost halved over the last six months.

The maverick adviser, who has often clashed with the Kremlin over policy, refused to say how President Vladimir Putin has reacted to his advice.

Illarionov said the level of competence shown by state officials in the Khodorkovsky trial was shameful. "I think the court showed deep incompetence from the economic and judicial points of view, and even from the point of view of the use of the Russian language. I was shocked by the low level of competence shown by the people representing the state. I felt a deep sense of shame for a state that for some reason has to represent itself in this way."