A court in the Smolensk region granted the petition of the former co-owner of Zapadny, Doninvest and Russian Land Bank Alexander Grigoriev, who was sentenced to 12 years in prison in the case of a criminal community that, according to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, withdrew more than 500 billion rubles from Russia, to replace the remaining term with a milder form of punishment. As Business FM was told in court, Grigoriev left after paying a fine of 300,000 rubles.
“The court granted the petition of the convict to replace the unserved part of the sentence with a fine of 300 thousand rubles. The decision of the court was not appealed, and it came into force, ”Anna Novichkova, press secretary of the Safonovsky District Court of the Smolensk Region, told the radio station.
Lawyer Sergei Shenknekht, who defended Grigoriev, told the radio station that he did not know anything about this, but his client, who was arrested in 2015, had served most of the 12-year sentence at the time of filing the petition and had long had the right to even file a petition for parole. . “He has not contacted me yet,” the defender said.
51-year-old Grigoriev, who is called the “king of cashing out” by the media, was previously involved in two high-profile cases of the so-called Moldovan Laundromat, a criminal community that, according to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, was created in 2013 by the owner of BC Moldindconbank SA (JSC CB Moldindconbank) Vyacheslav Platon together with businessmen Vladimir Plahotniuc, Alexander Korkin and Renato Usatii to withdraw money from Russia.
In their criminal scheme, the attackers involved more than 20 Russian banks. So, only from 2013 to 2014, under the guise of foreign exchange transactions, they illegally withdrew funds from Russia in the amount of more than 126 billion rubles, the investigation reported.
In total, the Ministry of Internal Affairs brought several dozen people to criminal liability in cases of the criminal community. At the same time, Plahotniuc, Platon and Usatii, who are citizens of both the Russian Federation and Moldova, managed to escape. They were arrested in absentia and put on the wanted list. In October 2020, Moldova refused to extradite Plato to Russia.
Alexander Grigoriev, who was initially accused of embezzling more than 2 billion rubles from two credit institutions controlled by him, was one of the first to appear before the court. However, he and five other defendants managed to “fight off” charges under the most serious article in organizing a criminal community (Article 210 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation – up to 20 years in prison). In August 2019, the Leninsky District Court of Rostov-on-Don sentenced Grigoriev for embezzlement and fraud on an especially large scale (part 4 of article 159 and part 4 of article 160 of the Criminal Code) to nine years in prison in a strict regime colony.
However, a year later, the Ministry of Internal Affairs brought charges against him and arrested him in the second case, incriminating him with involvement in the withdrawal of more than 126 million rubles from Russia. If in the first case Grigoriev denied his guilt, then in the second he preferred to admit his guilt and concluded a pre-trial agreement on cooperation with the prosecutor’s office.
On February 3, 2021, the Presnensky Court of Moscow considered his case in a special order and added four years in prison: Grigoriev, in conjunction with the first sentence, received 12 years in a strict regime colony.
Such a lenient punishment for the “head of a structural unit of a criminal community” (part 1 of article 210 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation), who was also accused of committing illegal currency transactions (part 3 of article 193.1 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation), as follows from the court verdict, is due to the fact that Grigoriev actively assisted the investigation in the disclosure and investigation of crimes. He “reported in detail about the circumstances of illegal foreign exchange operations of Russian credit organizations with the names of organizations, about the founders, leaders and participants of the international criminal community (criminal organization), revealed his role and the role of other accomplices in the criminal scheme, gave incriminating evidence against the organizers of the criminal community and heads of structural subdivisions, members of criminal organizations and other persons from among the owners, managers and employees of credit institutions involved in illegal foreign exchange transactions,” the judicial act says.
This, as noted in the verdict, allowed the investigation to find out previously unknown circumstances of the crimes, detain a number of people and charge them with embezzlement totaling more than 126 billion rubles, and put four more people on the wanted list.
Subsequently, on June 12, 2022, the Tverskoy Court of Moscow sentenced five defendants in the case on the withdrawal of 126 billion rubles from Russia under the so-called Moldovan scheme to terms from 15.5 to 19 years in prison with large fines. They denied their guilt. The Moscow City Court on March 24 will consider the complaint of the convicts against the verdict.
