The official representative of the Investigative Committee of Russia, Vladimir Markin, confirmed on Friday that searches are being carried out as part of a criminal case against Alexei Navalny and his brother Oleg.

“Indeed, searches are being carried out at the Kobyakovskaya wicker weaving factory, as well as in Oleg Navalny’s office,” Interfax quotes Markin’s statements.

Before this, oppositionist and blogger Alexei Navalny himself wrote on his Twitter microblog about searches of his relatives. “My brother was searched, and so were my parents,” he said . According to him, the search is taking place at his brother’s place of work. “A search is still underway at my brother’s place of work. That is, at the Russian Post, as I understand it. Maybe some letters or parcels will be found,” Navalny wrote.

Earlier on Friday, the Investigative Committee of Russia announced the initiation of a criminal case against Alexei Navalny and his brother Oleg on large-scale fraud and money laundering (Articles 159 and 174 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation). The case is being investigated by the Main Investigation Department of the Investigative Committee.

According to law enforcement agencies, in the spring of 2008, the brother of the oppositionist, the head of the department of internal mail of the branch of the Federal State Unitary Enterprise "Russian Post - Automated Sorting Centers" Oleg Navalny deceived representatives of "one of the trading companies with foreign capital" to enter into a contract for cargo transportation with LLC "Glavnoye Podpisnoye" agency" (“Glavpodpiska”). This company was created by Alexei Navalny, and its nominal founder and general director was his acquaintance, who subsequently had nothing to do with the activities of the LLC, the Investigative Committee claims.

The department believes that the brothers initially planned to provide cargo transportation services at a deliberately inflated cost and not through the efforts of Glavpodpiska, which “did not have the necessary material resources for this.” As a result, the real executor of the order was a transport company controlled by an acquaintance of Oleg Navalny. It ultimately served the defrauded company from August 2008 to May 2011. The services consisted of transporting mail along the Yaroslavl - Moscow route. During this period, the trading company transferred to the settlement account of Glavpodpiska an amount exceeding the volume of cargo transportation - 55 million rubles instead of 31 million rubles, for which the cargo was actually transported, the Investigative Committee claims.

Navalny himself called the accusations “complete nonsense.”

Investigators are conducting searches at Navalny's brother's home