The Gagarinsky Court of Moscow has begun considering the criminal case of former Minister for Open Government Affairs Mikhail Abyzov and 11 defendants accused of creating and participating in a criminal community.
It is reported by “Kommersant”.
The defendants are also charged with embezzlement of four billion rubles of the companies “SIBEKO” and “RES”, illegal business with the extraction of income for 32 billion rubles and commercial bribery for 78 million rubles.
The lawyer of the ex-minister Alexander Asnis noted a “rare feature” of this case – none of the defendants pleaded guilty, despite the fact that they spent more than three years in a pre-trial detention center. For them, the essence of the accusation still remains incomprehensible because it does not meet the requirements of the law and “elementary logic”. Abyzov called his case “an absolute compote of unrelated theses and arbitrary statements,” Asnis noted.
