Russian justice grips Navalni with a criminal process for large-scale fraud

Navalni, in a court hearing in August 2019 in Moscow.YURI KOCHETKOV / EFE

Legal cases are multiplied for Alexéi Navalni.

The Russian justice has opened a criminal case against the prominent opponent for large-scale fraud.

The Russian investigation committee investigates the dissident and several of his collaborators for the activities of their anti-corruption organizations.

The investigation ensures that Navalni spent more than 356 million rubles (about 3.9 million euros) on personal matters raised through donations for their organizations, according to the note released Tuesday night.

The opponent, who is still recovering in Germany from the poisoning suffered this summer in Siberia, has affirmed that the new process against him, which speaks of "theft of funds collected from citizens" is retaliation for his activities.

"It seems that [Vadímir] Putin is hysterical," he said on social media.

The case joins other pending processes of the lawyer and anti-corruption activist and opens only a few days after a journalistic investigation points to several Russian intelligence agents as suspects in the attack with a neurotoxin that almost cost him his life.

The prominent opponent, one of the best known voices against Putin in the West, believes that the Kremlin is trying by all means to prevent his return to Russia.

Navalni faces yet another threat from the Russian Administration.

The Russian federal prison service (SPF) gave oppositionist Alexei Navalni just a few hours on Monday night to report to its Moscow offices for a review of the sentence that Russia imposed on him in 2014 and which dictated a suspended sentence of more than three years in prison, in a controversial case considered "arbitrary" by the European Court of Human Rights.

The dissident could not comply with the ultimatum and did not attend the appointment on Tuesday.

The authorities will now determine if they carry out their threat and impose a prison sentence on the opponent, something that could keep him out of the Eurasian country, where he has stressed that he wants to return as soon as he fully recovers.

The Russian authorities sent a note to Navalni's lawyer in which it was stressed that the opponent can now go to the criminal review in the Russian capital because he has already recovered.

The SPF cites a report published in the prestigious scientific journal

The Lancet

in which the doctors who treated him in Germany describe that he was poisoned with a neurotoxin for military use from the Novichok family and what was his treatment.

Navalni has ironized that, when referring to the medical report, the Russian Administration recognizes in a certain way his poisoning, for which he blames the Russian leader directly.

“The SPF, based on the

Lancet

article

, demands that I be imprisoned.

But excuse me, the article is about me being poisoned by Novichok.

That means that at the official level the State recognizes the poisoning.

Where is the criminal case? ”, The opponent wrote on social networks.

The European Union has imposed sanctions on several top officials in Putin's circle for the Navalni poisoning, noting that the attack could not be carried out without the knowledge of the Kremlin, but Russia has not opened an official investigation to determine what happened to the opponent.

The threat from the prison service comes just days after a journalistic investigation identified the suspected Russian intelligence agents who carried out the poisoning in August in the Siberian city of Tomsk.

The Kremlin has denied any relationship and ensures that what happened with the opponent is a case manufactured by the United States.

This, however, is not the first time that the SPF has tried to transform Navani's conditional sentence into a real one.

The opponent was sentenced in 2014 to three and a half years in prison for embezzlement of funds from the Yves Rocher company, which resulted in parole.

The opponent appealed the sentence and went to the European Court of Human Rights, which ordered Russia to compensate Navalni with almost 20,000 euros and considered that the penalty for fraud against the opponent and also against his brother Oleg was "arbitrary and manifestly unfair."

This and other convictions and legal proceedings, which the opposition has defined as a political persecution, prevented Navalni from participating in the elections.

The opponent was disbarred and was unable to run for the presidential elections in March 2018, which Putin won by an overwhelming majority.