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Alexei Navalny fraud trial verdict brought forward | Alexei Navalny fraud trial verdict brought forward |
(35 minutes later) | |
The verdict in the fraud trial of the anti-Kremlin activist Alexei Navalny will be announced on Tuesday. The decision of a Moscow court has been brought forward suddenly after thousands of his supporters pledged to take to the streets on the original date, 15 January. | |
“The announcement of the verdict will take place on December 30 at 9am,” Navalny wrote on his blog. It may take more than a day to deliver the verdict. | |
His lawyers said the move appeared to be unprecedented. “I am not aware of a single case when the announcement of a verdict was brought forward,” said Navalny’s lawyer Olga Mikhailova. Navalny and his team said the move was apparently intended to thwart his supporters who pledged to turn up on Manezhnaya Square near the Kremlin walls on 15 January. “There are no exceptions that cannot be arranged for good people,” Navalny wrote. | |
Along with his brother Oleg, Navalny is accused of defrauding the French cosmetics company Yves Rocher of nearly 27m roubles, then worth more than £320,000, but the company has said it suffered no damages by working with the Navalny brothers. | |
Navalny, who rose to prominence during the anti-Kremlin protests staged in 2011-12, faced a five-year prison sentence last year over alleged embezzlement but walked away with a suspended sentence. | |
Authorities had warned that the Kremlin crackdown on Navalny could backfire amid mounting economic problems. Some said the January rally threatened to become the biggest demonstration against president Vladimir Putin’s rule since the beginning of Moscow’s confrontation with the west over Ukraine last year. | |
The decision to expedite the verdict is reminiscent of the end of 2010 when a judge raced against time to wrap up a second trial of the Kremlin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky. On 30 December 2010, Khodorkovsky was sentenced to a second term in prison over theft and money laundering. Last December, Putin pardoned Khodorkovsky after a decade in prison. | |
Prosecutors last week called for Navalny to be sentenced to 10 years in prison. | |
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