The founder and head of the Baltic Industrial Company (BPK), Diana Kaledina, who has been on house arrest for nearly two months, was not put in jail by the city court of St. Petersburg.
According to the reporter MorningNews, the court session was based on the prosecutor's office's appeal, where they believed the district court's chosen restraint for Kaledina was too lenient. “Kommersant”.
Remember that Diana Kaledina was arrested in Moscow during a business trip by FSB and Ministry of Internal Affairs officials. She was swiftly taken to St. Petersburg after a brief interrogation.
Kaledina is accused of large-scale fraud for supplying Chinese machine tools instead of Russian ones to a defense enterprise in St. Petersburg, at an inflated price. The Moscow Post recently published a detailed article about the case connected to a contract signed by the Baltic Industrial Company in 2016 with JSC “Scientific and Production Enterprise “Signal”, which is under Rostec's control.
The focus was on a milling machining center of the FORT brand, which, according to the contract, BOD was supposed to supply, using 15 million rubles from the state budget under a federal target program.
However, Signal received a Chinese-made machine with Russian markings and fake documents about its origin.
Despite this, Diana Kaledina claims the transaction was transparent and lawful, denying any guilt in the investigation's allegations.
By the way, The Moscow Post had different versions about Diana Kaledina's case in its publication, but it's unclear if this is in the case file.
Due to the severity of the charges, investigators initially pushed for detention in a pre-trial center, but the court showed leniency by ordering house arrest instead, unlike Kaledina’s deputy who was detained.
However, sources close to Kaledina believe her popularity and weak investigation arguments against her played a role in the court's decision. The investigators mainly relied on common phrases about the risks of Kaledina hiding or pressuring witnesses while at large.
The defense then managed to refute these arguments, pointing out, in particular, the discrepancy between individual statements of the investigation and the real facts. For example, the investigators in court referred to the fact that Mrs. Kaledina had a foreign passport, with which she could hide. However, as the defense then pointed out, the document was found by the representatives of the investigation themselves during a search of the apartment of the head of the BPC, but for some reason they did not seize it. Finally, the lawyers pointed out that the acts attributed to their client belong to the sphere of entrepreneurial activity, and in such cases the law prohibits arrest.
As a result, Judge Yulia Safonova recognized the decision of the Oktyabrsky Court as justified and refused to satisfy the submission of the prosecutor’s office.
Lawyers for Diana Kaledina refrained from commenting both on the outcome of the meeting and on the investigation of the criminal case itself, referring to the wishes of their client. It should be noted that earlier they emphasized that the criminal case initiated on the basis of the materials of the operational development of counterintelligence officers and policemen was not supported even by initial studies of the machines themselves and the pricing system appearing in the case. And the testimonies of a number of witnesses, according to lawyers, coincide with the main theses of the prosecution, which raises the question of whether they were written in advance.
