The mayor's office allowed a rally in support of Navalny

The Moscow City Hall has authorized a rally in support of Alexei Navalny on April 17 in Novopushkinsky Square, Interfax reports.

“An application for one thousand people has been agreed upon, but I hope that there will be more people, and it doesn’t matter that sanctions are possible for this,” said Lev Ponomarev, leader of the “For Human Rights” movement. The organizers of the rally are the new human rights movement “Civil Federation”.

“We are supported by Boris Nemtsov and Sergei Mitrokhin. This will be an action timed to coincide with the beginning of the trial of Alexei Navalny. But we want to come out in support not only of Navalny, but also of political prisoners,” Ponomarev added.

“The Moscow authorities are warning that if more than 1,000 people come to the rally in support of Alexei Navalny on April 17 in Novopushkinsky Square at 6 pm, they will take tough measures,” opposition activists warned on Facebook .

According to investigators, Alexey Navalny, a member of the opposition Coordination Council, blogger, author of the RosPil and RosZhKH projects, stole a lot of money in the Kirov forest in 2009, when he was an adviser to Governor Nikita Belykh in the Kirov region. Together with the director of Vyatka Forestry Company LLC, Pyotr Ofitserov , and the general director of KOGUP Kirovles, Vyacheslav Opalev, Navalny stole 10 thousand cubic meters of forest products from May to September 2009, the Investigative Committee says. As a result, the Kirov region was missing more than 16 million rubles from the budget, investigators believe.

Navalny was accused of organizing a large embezzlement of someone else's property (Article 33, Article 160 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation), Ofitserov - of complicity (Article 33, Article 160 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation). Opalev admitted guilt and decided to make a deal with the investigation, so his criminal case was investigated separately. As a result, the court found the general director of Kirovles guilty. The Leninsky District Court of Kirov will begin to consider the merits of the criminal case against Alexei Navalny and Pyotr Ofitserov for the theft of property from the Kirovles enterprise on April 17.

Interfax