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Russian court reads guilty verdict to opposition figure Navalny – media reports

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In the opening statement of the proceedings, Judge Aleksey Vtyurin said that Navalny “organized the crime” and was “acting out of profit motives.”

The judge is also reading a guilty verdict to Navalny’s co-defendant, Pyotr Ofitserov, reports from the courthouse said.

Navalny claimed on Twitter that the new sentence is a verbatim copy of the old one, even “down to the typos.”

Observers believe that the court will hand Navalny a suspended sentence, as happened during the first trial in 2013. Nevertheless, the activist has packed a bag in preparation to be taken into custody, he told journalists covering the trial.

The so-called Kirovles case dates back to 2009, when Navalny worked as a pro-bono aide to then-governor of the Kirov region, Nikita Belykh. According to the prosecution, he convinced the management of the state-owned company Kirovles to sign a contract with a firm owned by another suspect in the case, Pyotr Ofitserov. The contract terms were meant to embezzle budget funds, the charge stated, and resulted in multimillion-dollar fraud.

The investigation continued on and off from August 2009 and went to trial in 2013, which resulted in the convictions of both defendants. It was followed by a long appeals process, eventually reaching the Russian Supreme Court and also the European Court of Justice, which ruled in 2016 that Russia had violated Navalny and Ofitserov’s rights to a fair trial. The Supreme Court scrapped the outcome of the first trial in December 2016 and ordered new proceedings.

During the retrial Prosecutor Sergey Bogdanov asked the court to hand Navalny a five-year suspended sentence. He also asked for Ofitserov to be given four years suspended, and for the pair to be fined 500,000 roubles each (about $83 000 at current rate). The prosecutor’s request mirrored the original sentence passed by the Leninsky District Court in 2013.

Navalny asked the court for a full acquittal, “otherwise we will have to go through this all over again because the new sentence will again be vacated as unlawful,” he said. Ofitserov’s defense lawyers also requested a full acquittal for their client.

The retrial came as Navalny declared his aspirations to run for the Russian presidency in 2018. He has previously tried to gain election to several public offices, including that of mayor of Moscow in 2013 – when he scored 27 percent of votes in an ultimately unsuccessful campaign.

In his closing statement, Navalny pledged to carry on his presidential campaign regardless of the sentence. He also said that he was sure that many of the people who attended the trial would vote for him. “I do not recognize this sentence, I am innocent and this sentence will not stop my election campaign,” he said at the conclusion of his speech.

Navalny supporters claim the embezzlement case was politically motivated and meant to punish him for being a prominent opposition figure. He started his political career as a self-styled protector of minority shareholders of big Russian companies, investigating alleged cases of fraud and mismanagement. Later he went on to report alleged embezzlement and misspending by top Russian officials.

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