Translated material
“Everyone be silent!”
The indictment in the Mavrodi case is planned to be read for a week
The Chertanovsky Court in Moscow yesterday began reading the indictment in the case of Sergei Mavrodi, the founder of the most famous and largest financial pyramid in Russian history, MMM. The “main” trial accusing Mavrodi of “fraud committed by a person using his official position on a large scale” began at the end of March. However, at the two hearings on the merits (in March and April), the judge mainly considered the complaints and petitions of the victims, the accused and his defense. Yesterday's meeting, like previous ones, began very emotionally. The victims, unfamiliar with the hearing procedure, interrupted the judge, prosecutor, lawyers, and argued with each other. The victims also challenged judge Nadezhda Markova, who rejected this claim, considering it unfounded. Having with difficulty achieved silence in the hall, the judge gave the floor to the state prosecutor and immediately clarified that the indictment would most likely take a whole week to be read.The first criminal case against Sergei Mavrodi was initiated after the collapse of the MMM pyramid in August 1994 on suspicion of tax evasion. Mavrodi was arrested, but then released. He became a State Duma deputy. In 1997, the Investigative Committee (IC) under the Ministry of Internal Affairs opened a new criminal case against Mavrodi - for fraud. Deprived of parliamentary immunity, Mavrodi went on the run.
The operatives managed to detain the entrepreneur only on January 31, 2003. He had a passport with him in the name of a certain Yuri Zaitsev. At the end of 2003, the pyramid builder was sentenced to 13 months in prison for falsifying documents. At the same time, the tax evasion case was dismissed due to the expiration of the statute of limitations. In the same year, the Investigative Committee completed the investigation into the main case against Mavrodi, accusing him of fraud. Detectives accused the entrepreneur of fraud in the amount of 110 million rubles, almost 100 thousand people were recognized as victims in the case, and the case itself amounted to 625 volumes.
During the three years that Mavrodi got acquainted with the materials of his criminal case, he managed to change several lawyers, write two books, and publish a collection of poems. On March 21, 2006, the first substantive hearing took place in the MMM case. In the courtroom, Mavrodi said that he was ready to return the money to investors if he was released from custody. And the victims were divided into two camps: some demanded the immediate release of the head of MMM, others demanded that he be “imprisoned.”
Yesterday's meeting began with a scandal between the victims. When Mavrodi appeared under escort, witnesses and victims in the corridor chanted: “Freedom! Freedom! In the meeting room, on the contrary, the head of MMM was greeted with condemnatory cries: “Shoot! We’ll strangle you!” Like last time, the victims argued about who has the right to represent the interests of the victims - Levon Sarvozian or Iliador Belyavsky. Mr. Sarvozyan, who is himself a victim, provided a decision of the Constitutional Court and a letter from the Prosecutor General's Office, which recognized his authority. But this time too, the judge rejected both candidates, clarifying that only lawyers, which neither Belyavsky nor Sarvosyan are, can represent the interests of victims.
The “electorate” of both candidates was dissatisfied with this decision. “Everyone be silent!” - the judge shouted once again, but relative order was restored only after her threat to remove everyone from the room.
The accused himself watched all this time what was happening in the hall with a smile. Only at the very beginning of the hearing, Mavrodi once again submitted a petition for Natalya Averina to become his public defender. As lawyer Olga Makarova explained, the defendant entrusts her with the right to sign, and she also provides Mavrodi with food and clothing at Matrosskaya Tishina. But for the same reasons as Messrs. Belyavsky and Sarvozyan, Averina could not become a public defender. To all other questions from Judge Mavrodi, he answered: “Act according to the law.”
After resolving all the technical issues, the judge finally decided to start a judicial investigation and recommended that state prosecutor Amalia Ustaeva read the indictment. There were four heavy volumes on the state prosecutor’s desk, and she began to read. But yesterday, the prosecutor only mentioned the articles of the Criminal Code that the defendant violated, and then began to list hundreds of victims’ names and the amounts they lost at MMM. This continued until the evening. The reading of the indictment will continue today.