Russian Court Convicts Top Putin Foe in Fraud Trial

Local Editor

A Russian court on Thursday convicted protest leader Alexei Navalny of embezzlement, in a verdict that will disqualify one of President Vladimir Putin's fiercest critics from politics and could see him jailed for several years.

Judge Sergei Blinov said he found Navalny guilty of colluding to steal 16 million rubles [$500,000] in a timber deal while acting as an unpaid advisor to the local government in the northern Kirov region.

Blinov was reading through the full judgment before issuing a sentence, a process which could still take several hours despite his high-speed delivery which made parts of the verdict almost inaudible.
"The court has established that Navalny organized the criminal act and led the execution of this large-scale embezzlement," Blinov told the cramped courthouse in Kirov.

Anti-Kremlin activists have slammed the trial as the latest in a line of moves by Putin to snuff out the slightest hint of opposition to his 13 years of rule.
Prosecutors in Kirov, a sleepy city 900 kilometres northeast of Moscow, are seeking a six-year prison colony sentence.

The conviction alone will remove Navalny, who was on Wednesday registered to run for Moscow mayor, from politics once the appeals process is exhausted.
The entire court had to stand throughout the first 90 minutes of the judgment before Blinov announced a brief break.
In a relatively unusual move, the court has allowed video recording of the entire trial to be broadcast live online.

The verdict comes a day after he was accepted as a candidate for the high-profile Moscow mayoral race in September, raising the bizarre prospect that he could run for office while behind bars.
Navalny has said he wants to challenge Putin in the next presidential elections in 2018 and coined the phrase "the party of crooks and thieves" to describe the ruling United Russia party.

Source: News Agencies, Edited by website team