The Navalny brothers collect more than four million rubles in compensation for ‘unjust verdicts’ in the Yves Rocher case

Anti-corruption activist Alexey Navalny revealed on August 2 that the Russian government paid him and his brother “more than four million rubles” ($63,150) in July to compensate them for the “unjust verdicts” in the Yves Rocher case. In October 2017, the ECHR ordered the Russian government to pay Alexey and Oleg Navalny 76,000 euros and 460,000 rubles in compensation for what the court determined to be an unfair trial that landed Oleg in prison for 3.5 years and sentenced Alexey to as many years of probation for supposedly embezzling several million rubles from an Eastern European subsidiary of the cosmetics company Yves Rocher. Oleg went free from prison in late June 2018.

In April 2018, the Presidium of the Russian Supreme Court refused to overturn the “Yves Rocher” verdict, and simultaneously concluded that the case should be reopened to consider the “new facts.” Navalny’s lawyer didn’t want the investigation reopened, however, and has pointed out that the last ECHR ruling to force a retrial of a case against Alexey Navalny (the “Kirovles” case) resulted in a verdict that was identical to the first.

• On August 2, the Moscow City Court upheld a lower court’s decision to extend Alexey Navalny’s probation in the Kirovles case, though it lifted a requirement that he must report to a probation officer at the Federal Penitentiary Service every Monday. Local prison officials got a judge to extend Navalny’s probation to July 8, 2019, in light of several short jail terms he’s served in recent years for minor offenses related to unpermitted protests.
• Navalny’s lawyer has warned that this extension will only further delay her client’s ability to run for elected office (currently, Navalny’s criminal record makes him ineligible for elections for another 11 years), and it gives the Federal Penitentiary Service more opportunities to appeal to have Navalny’s sentence converted to a prison sentence. (The agency has repeatedly filed such requests, but the courts have always rejected them.)