On Tuesday, July 2, the Leninsky District Court of Kirov held a regular hearing on the Kirovles case. Lawyers for oppositionist Alexei Navalny and his friend Pyotr Ofitserov, accused of embezzling more than 16 million rubles, continued to fight the court for the opportunity to provide evidence of their clients’ innocence. They succeeded with varying degrees of success: the former vice-governor of the Kirov region, Maria Gaidar, and several other witnesses who came voluntarily gave testimony in defense of the defendants. The court again refused to question the others, and the defense has less and less room for maneuver.

The meeting on the Kirovles case lasted the entire working day and turned out to be a loop. It began with the challenge of judge Sergei Blinov for refusing two weeks ago to question all defense witnesses. And it ended with Blinov refusing to call these witnesses again.

“I have a small statement. About your recusal,” Pyotr Ofitserov’s lawyer Svetlana Davydova began right off the bat. In 17 court hearings, this was already the fourth challenge to Judge Blinov. He, with his characteristic indifferent expression on his face, prepared to listen. The petition turned out to be not so small: for twenty minutes Davydova said that she and her colleagues, not to mention the defendants, had objective doubts about the impartiality of the judge. Davydova explained that even the assumption of bias and bias is grounds for recusal. And in the case of Navalny and Ofitserov, such assumptions only multiply with each new meeting. The basis for the recusal application was Blinov’s refusal to call all defense witnesses.

“The prosecution believed that our witnesses would not say anything new, but supported this only with some abstract arguments. You, as the presiding judge, by agreeing with the accusation, were not only biased. You have demonstrated very clearly that you are not going to give equal opportunities to the parties,” Davydova’s lawyer scolded the judge. In addition, she drew attention to a funny coincidence: the verdict in the case of the former director of the Kirovles State Unitary Enterprise Vyacheslav Opalev (investigators are building a case against Navalny on his confessions), the filing of charges against the oppositionist, the promotion of the senior state prosecutor in the Kirovles case, Sergei Bogdanov, and himself judges Blinov - these are events that fit into two months, December of last year and January of this year. Davydova does not consider these four circumstances to be a coincidence.

Judge Blinov left to think, including about this conspiracy theory. Returning half an hour later, he complained that the challenge prepared by the lawyers “does not show exactly how personnel appointments can influence the course of the case.” At this point the petition was rejected.

Before lunch, the court added to the case those defense motions that the lawyers had with them, and refused to add to the case those materials that had to be demanded from somewhere. This would mean that the process would drag on, while Judge Blinov at the last hearings showed in every possible way that this is exactly what he would like to avoid.

During the hearing, Navalny himself managed to write two posts on his blog (according to him, he writes especially well in the atmosphere of the Lenin Court) and went to parallel hearings at the Kirov Regional Court. bring him to one of the court hearings There he tried to challenge the fact that they tried to forcefully - by issuing a criminal record against him. His attempts did not bring him success in the court hearing of the highest authority: the panel of judges recognized the drive as legal.

Alexei Navalny Photo: Sergey Karpukhin/Reuters

After lunch, the lawyers filed a motion to interrogate Maria Gaidar, a longtime acquaintance of the oppositionist, former vice-governor of the Kirov region, and several other witnesses. The defense lawyers explained that the defense witnesses had already arrived and were in the corridor of the court building - Judge Blinov had no choice but to reluctantly agree and listen to the witnesses. Of all those whom the “liberal” Nikita Belykh, appointed governor in 2009, invited to his team, Gaidar, as often happens with officials responsible for social affairs, earned the greatest dislike from Kirov residents. Even during a break in the meeting, some stern local journalist specially approached Maria Gaidar with her own interrogation: why in one of the hospitals opened under her, there were cracks in the walls and the ceiling was crumbling.

In court, Gaidar introduced herself as an individual entrepreneur and freelance journalist for Echo of Moscow - she works on a voluntary basis as an adviser to the vice-mayor of Moscow on social issues, Leonid Pechatnikov. Her testimony towards Navalny and Ofitserov was friendly, but did not add too many details to the existing picture. Gaidar turned out to have known Navalny and Ofitserov for a long time, since 2005, when Yabloko and the then existing Union of Right Forces coalition went to the Moscow City Duma elections. Gaidar said that all the officials and advisers invited to work in Kirov lived in the Black Lake residence (this is not far from the city; the previous authorities turned a children's boarding house there into their residence), where they discussed the current state of affairs in the region every day over dinner. Including the state of the Kirovles enterprise.

At the fifth minute of interrogation, Judge Blinov began to cough, first imperceptibly, then more and more obviously, then he could not stand it and announced a short break. “You shocked the judge, witness,” Navalny cheerfully told Maria Gaidar.

Blinov returned, and Gaidar continued to say that under the Belykhs, Navalny was an advisor on a voluntary basis, could not give any orders to anyone, and all officials and directors were well aware of this. Thus, Gaidar became another witness who questioned Opalev’s assertion that Navalny forced him to enter into an agreement with the Vyatka Forestry Company (VLC) of Pyotr Ofitserov. “You, Alexey, first tried to help Opalev with the sale of products, then you talked about the need to reorganize the enterprise. Then they spoke about him in your characteristic harsh manner, Alexey,” said the witness. As for Ofitserov, he, according to Gaidar, was one of the entrepreneurs who responded to the Belykh’s call to do business in the Kirov region. And Navalny only used his knowledge to prove the ineffectiveness of KOGUP. The version of the investigation, supported by the words of Opalev, already conditionally sentenced in the Kirovles case, is the opposite: allegedly Navalny, taking advantage of his status close to the governor, imposed on the state logging enterprise the services of the “laying” company VLK, which bought products from Kirovles at a reduced price. price, trying to sell it to end consumers at market price.

It so happened that Gaidar became the only direct witness to Navalny’s defense. The other three witnesses who voluntarily came to court did not know Navalny - these were former employees of the VLK. The first of them, Kirov resident Irina Merkusheva, found a job through an advertisement and came to VLK for an internship. “We were sitting on the ground floor of a house on the corner of Karl Marx and Proletarskaya,” she recalled.

Merkusheva said that she worked in the same office for about a month with Opalev’s stepdaughter Marina Bura at the moment when VLK and Kirovles were concluding a cooperation agreement, and Bura was drawing up this agreement. And, according to Merkusheva, her office neighbor did not look like a person who was under pressure from Navalny and Ofitserov. “A person who is under pressure is sad, disadvantaged, worried, but Bur had a smile on his face,” said Merkusheva. The agreement, she said, was concluded in a friendly atmosphere. And every appearance of Ofitserov (the witness never saw Navalny in the VLK office) did not cause fear and horror, but quite the opposite. “As soon as Pyotr Yuryevich came to us, we immediately took out cups and prepared tea. Well, you know, a little feminine,” Merkusheva smiled.

Merkusheva still has warm feelings for Ofitserov several years later. “He is decent, friendly, and cared about KOGUP. Like, what if they go bankrupt, four thousand people work there, and they all have families,” she said.

Over the course of a month, Merkusheva also became such good friends with Marina Bura that conversations began about “all things feminine.” Bura said that she is Opalev’s adopted daughter and is very grateful to him for helping her with her career. That is, it was simply impossible to imagine that she could act not in the interests of her father, the witness concluded.

Merkusheva also said that working with Kirovles after the conclusion of the contract was a continuous problem for Ofitserov’s company. The enterprise supplied VLK with only 10-20 percent of the ordered products, and terrible confusion reigned in the document flow. “They will bring you documents now, tear them up, everything is written there incorrectly,” Merkusheva recounted one of her conversations with Marina Bura.

Other defense witnesses painted the same picture. “I heard Peter talking to Opalev a couple of times. In a raised tone, let’s say,” said Pyotr Ofitserov’s brother Dmitry, who is the general director of the still formally existing VLK. “And as for KOGUP... We are fulfilling an order for the Balabanovskaya factory, and instead of the three-meter match strand required by the standard, they send a six-meter one. No one will take him in this form. We tell them: saw it, but it’s rotten inside - that is, everyone at the factory will be rejected,” Dmitry Ofitserov described the decline of VLK’s relationship with Kirovles.

Former VLK accountant Elena Ovsyannikova brought to the court a stack of bills received by email from Kirovles - with errors in the amounts and account numbers. If any of these payments were made, it would be against the law. The court refused to include them in the case as improperly executed: the emails did not contain signatures or seals.

After this, the struggle between the judge and lawyers began again. Svetlana Davydova again asked to bring a number of witnesses and experts to the court, but the court refused. I asked to include a number of payment documents, but the court also refused. Then Davydova filed a motion to re-interrogate ex-Belykh adviser Andrei Votinov, convicted of attempted fraud. Moreover, he had already been a witness for the prosecution and was left in the pre-trial detention center specifically for the possibility of repeated interrogation. After a short but heated argument, the judge refused to re-examine and announced a recess until the morning of Wednesday, July 3.

If the defense still has motions, the court will hear them, and then all that remains is to set a date for the parties to argue. Local lawyers, in a conversation with Lenta.ru, said that in the Kirov region there is an unspoken rule: a criminal case should not be considered for more than three months. The consideration of the merits of the case of Navalny and Ofitserov, we recall, began in mid-April.

Lenta.ru: Russia: Politics: Witnesses of despair