The court recognized the arrest of ex-head Vaka Shamkhalov legal

The Moscow City Court recognized the arrest of the former chairman of the highest certification commission of the Ministry of Education and Science of Felix Shamkhalov, RAPSI reports. Thus, the court rejected the appeal of his defense, insisting on the release from custody.

On February 7, the Tver court of Moscow imposed Shamkhalov into custody until March 24. The investigator at a court hearing said, in particular, that the witnesses in this case are threatened. In turn, the defense asked the court to release the suspect under the personal guarantee of the State Duma deputy Sergei Kalashnikov or a cash deposit of 3 million rubles. Shamkhalov himself said that he was not involved in the theft of money and told in detail the story of obtaining a loan. He connects his criminal prosecution with the raider intentions of the leaders of Vnesheconombank, who allegedly want to take away a large plot of land from him in the Odintsovo district of the Moscow Region.

On February 14, Shamkhalov was an official charge of embezzlement of VEB funds worth 1.5 billion rubles. Earlier it was reported that theft amount was 350 million. Shamkhalov is accused under Part 4 of Article 159 of the Criminal Code (fraud on an especially large scale). The maximum sanction for it is imprisonment for up to ten years with restriction of liberty for up to two years. After the detention, Shamkhalov was removed from office. The new chairman of the Higher Attestation Commission was appointed by the former Minister of Education Vladimir Filippov.

Earlier, Kommersant reported that the elite residential complex in the Odintsovo district, for which Shamkhalov and general director of Zarech-2 LLC Anton Solovarov took a loan from VEB in 2006, is still at the initial stage of construction. In November 2012, it became known that the VEB through the court demanded to recover from the Zarechy-2 loan debt. According to the publication, it was as part of the criminal investigation that Shamkhalov was detained on this application. Previously, he was a co-owner of the "Zarechy-2".

On April 3, the Moscow Arbitration Court will consider VEB’s lawsuit to recover 188.6 million dollars of a loan debt with Zarech-2 LLC. Initially, the lawsuit was filed for the recovery of $ 178.4 million, including 124.177 of the main debt, but the bank in the course of one of the meetings increased the amount of the penalty by increasing the amount of interest.

Shamkhalov was detained on February 5 amid a scandal erupting at the end of 2012. Then a number of publications appeared on blogs and the media, in which a number of dissertations who defended work at the Moscow Pedagogical State University were convicted of falsifications. The Ministry of Internal Affairs argues that the detention of Shamkhalov is in no way connected with scandals around fake dissertations and a ministerial inspection of the Moscow Pedagogical State University. The matter concerns exclusively the commercial activity of the official.