| The Supreme Court of the Russian Federation yesterday partially satisfied the cassation appeals of the lawyers of the famous St. Petersburg businessman and public figure Mikhail Mirilashvili. His sentence was reduced by four years to eight years in prison. However, this verdict did not satisfy Mirilashvili’s lawyers, and the defenders intend to file a complaint by way of supervision to the Presidium of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation. On August 1, 2003, the Military Court of the Leningrad Military District sentenced the owner of the Petromir and Konti Group holdings, the ex-vice president of the Russian Jewish Congress, to 12 years in a maximum security colony. Then Mirilashvili was found guilty of committing three crimes, including organizing the kidnapping of three people. The St. Petersburg prosecutor's office considered that Mirilashvili created an “organized criminal group” to free his father, who was kidnapped by unknown assailants on August 7, 2000. True, the very next day Mirilashvili Sr. was released. However, the investigation accused Mikhail Mirilashvili of detaining three Georgian citizens on his orders - Kakushadze, Dvali and Grigolashvili. Subsequently, the latter was also released, and Dvali and Kakushadze were killed. The prosecutor's office charged Mirilashvili with the murder of these people. Moreover, the investigation believed that the organization of the father’s release, as well as the reprisal against the perpetrators, was carried out by employees of the Konti and Petromir companies. However, the Military Court of the Leningrad Military District considered the organization of the murder unproven and convicted the businessman only for organizing the kidnapping. It is curious that seven people who were in the same dock as Mirilashvili were found completely innocent by the Military Court. The businessman's defense will seek to have all charges against their client dropped. Victor MATVEEV, St. Petersburg
Bullet for the judge
In Makhachkala on Tuesday evening, federal judge of the Leninsky District Court of the Dagestan capital Karimulla Dagirov was shot dead. According to the republican Ministry of Internal Affairs, the emergency occurred in the very center of the city in the courtyard of the house on Gamidov Avenue, where Mr. Dagirov lived. The criminals waylaid him around 8 p.m. when the judge was returning from work. According to eyewitnesses, when the official had already approached the entrance, two young men in tracksuits ran up to him and one of them shot the man several times almost point-blank. When ambulance doctors and detectives arrived on the scene, the judge was already dead. Experts established that he died almost instantly from two bullet wounds to the heart. So far, the investigation is checking all possible versions of the assassination attempt - from a domestic quarrel to professional activity. According to the deceased’s colleagues, 44-year-old Karimulla Dagirov was appointed judge of the Leninsky District Court of Makhachkala in 2000, and was mainly involved in civil rather than criminal cases. Before that, he worked for more than ten years in the court of the Babayurt district of Dagestan. Alexander RASKIN
Andreev was left idle
The Investigative Committee (IC) under the Ministry of Internal Affairs, as it became known yesterday, has once again dropped the scandalous criminal case of the theft of the assets of Avtobank, Ingosstrakh and the NOSTA metallurgical plant from businessman Andrei Andreev. The businessman himself claims that the shares of these enterprises were taken away from him through fraud and threats. The Investigative Committee is confident that all the transactions were legal, and closed the case in the summer, but then the Prosecutor General’s Office ordered the investigation to be resumed. Now investigators have eliminated some shortcomings in the materials and again decided to write them off in the archive.
Until 2001, stakes in Avtobank, Ingosstrakh and NOSTA were controlled by Mr. Andreev and several of his partners. But then Krasnoyarsk businessman Rodion Gamzaev and the head of Avtobank Natalia Raevskaya, as co-owners of the securities, sold them. On September 28, 2001, representatives of Basic Element, Nafta-Moscow and Millhouse Capital announced that they had bought the shares for $90 million. The next day, Mr. Andreev wrote a receipt that he had no complaints about this transaction, but a few months later he went to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. There he stated that the shares were stolen from him by fraud and threats by three Krasnoyarsk authorities - Rodion Gamzaev, Sergei Botev and Yaroslav Kuznetsov and, in addition, he knows about the location of the arsenal of these persons. On November 9, 2001, employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs actually discovered a weapons warehouse at the address indicated by Andreev on Stary Gai Street, but it was never revealed who it belonged to.
On June 30 of this year, the Investigative Committee closed the case initiated on the theft of shares, recognizing transactions with securities as “fair.” But the Prosecutor General’s Office took the materials for study and ordered the case to be reopened. “We found out that Andreev and Gamzaev knew each other,” the Ministry of Internal Affairs told us, “and owned property on a parity basis. The shares were officially sold for $90 million. Andreev agreed with this, but then he considered that the real price of the securities was $200 million and, without receiving the additional payment, turned to the police. Having found this out, we closed the case, but it was reopened for formal reasons. At the time of termination of the case, the examination of the value of the shares had not been completed and responses to a number of requests to other countries had not been received. Now we have closed the case again, justifying our actions in detail: an expensive examination of shares is simply not necessary, since in this whole story there is no corpus delicti and the case will not go to court; and countries with offshore companies usually ignore our messages, and it is useless to wait for a response from them. Now the Prosecutor General’s Office has again taken up the case for study, and we hope she will agree with our point of view.”
“I do not agree with the decision of the Investigative Committee, I consider it illegal and I will seek its cancellation,” Andrei Andreev told us. “I have already written a complaint to the Prosecutor General’s Office. What the Ministry of Internal Affairs told you about the essence of the criminal case does not correspond to reality.” Alexander SHVAREV
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