Elena Basner under house arrest

Today, February 5, the Oktyabrsky District Court of St. Petersburg decided to choose a preventive measure for art critic Elena Basner in the form of a home arrest for a period of two months.

Thus, the court granted the petition of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation, Baltinfo reports. The lawyer asked to release the suspect on bail of 1 million rubles. Elena Basner will be delivered to the apartment directly from the courtroom.

On January 31, Elena Basner was detained by law enforcement agencies after she arrived in St. Petersburg from Helsinki for two days. On February 2, the October Court extended the deadline for three days.

On Tuesday evening, on February 4, art critic was officially charged under Part 4 of Art. 159 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation ("Fraud on an especially large scale"). According to investigators, in 2009 she gave a deliberately false conclusion about the authenticity of the artist Boris Grigoryev’s canvas “in a restaurant”, as a result of which the fake picture was sold for $ 250 thousand.

Elena Basner's colleagues believe that she could not be involved in fraud. The director of the Hermitage, Mikhail Piotrovsky, called her imprisonment, called her insult to the entire Russian intelligentsia.