The verdict against Navalny was returned to court to eliminate procedural violations

The Kirov Regional Court withdrew from consideration the appeal of Alexei Navalny's lawyers in the "Kirovles case" and returned the verdict to the court of first instance to eliminate procedural violations. about this on March 15 The politician wrote in his blog.

In fact, this means that after the violations are corrected in the Leninsky District Court of Kirov, whose judge sentenced Navalny to 5 years of suspended imprisonment on February 8, 2017, the regional court will resume consideration of the appeal. This is due to the fact that the Leninsky Court refused to issue audio recordings of court sessions to the lawyers of the politician, citing the fact that, for technical reasons, a recording of one of the sessions was not made. Accordingly, Navalny's defense was unable to verify the audio recordings with the minutes of the meetings and formulate their comments on them.

On February 8, the court found Alexei Navalny and Pyotr Ofitserov guilty of embezzling funds from the Kirovles state enterprise and sentenced them to five and four years of suspended imprisonment, respectively, as well as a fine of 500,000 rubles each. The sentence in many places coincides to the letter with the previous sentence, which was handed down in 2013. On July 18, 2013, the Leninsky Court of Kirov sentenced Navalny and Ofitserov to five and four years in prison on charges of embezzlement of property from the Kirovles company (part 4 of article 160 of the Criminal Code with application of part 3 of article 33).

On October 16, 2013, the Court of Appeal replaced the sentences for both with suspended sentences - this was preceded by mass protests in a number of Russian cities.

On February 23, 2016, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg recognized that Navalny and Ofitserov were convicted for acts that cannot be distinguished from ordinary business activities. At the same time, recognizing that the Russian court should take into account the figure of Navalny and his public activities, the ECHR did not see a political motive in the Kirovles case. In accordance with the decision of the ECHR, Russia had to pay Navalny and Ofitserov a total of 71,000 euros in compensation for legal costs and 8,000 euros each in damages.

On November 16, 2016, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation overturned the verdict and sent the "Kirovles case" for retrial.