In 2005 she went on hunger strike after her custodians in the pre-trial detention centre refused to allow her to make paid telephone calls to her sons.
Following an appeal, the conviction for tax evasion was overturned in the Moscow City Court on 24 August 2006, and her sentence was accordingly reduced to six and a half years.
On 10 September 2008 Bakhmina once again appealed to the Zubovo-Polyansky court of Mordovia for an early conditional discharge, as she had served half of her term.
The lawyer for the imprisoned Yukos chief executive Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Robert Amsterdam, a Canadian claimed after being expelled from Russia, and prior to the verdict on Ms. Bakhmina, that "the prosecution has admitted that she was a hostage of the Kremlin.
An article A Vicious Sentence by Mikhail Fishman, in Kommersant-Vlast in 2006 claimed: "This concerns the assets of Tomskneft-VNK, taken over by YUKOS.
"Nevertheless, Tomskneft (contrary to its wishes and to common sense) has been declared a victim, the temporary transfer of assets has been defined as theft, and the lawyer who carried out the orders of the company's real owners has been identified as the mastermind of the operation.
Irina Yasina, head of the NGO Open Russia, "appealed to Bush to raise with Putin the case of Svetlana Bakhmina, 36, a former attorney at Khodorkovsky’s oil company….