He received 6 years of general regime as a brother for trying to steal 25% of Inteko shares from his sister, the widow of the former mayor of Moscow Elena Baturina

The trial in the Simonovsky Court ended with a guilty verdict and a term of six years in a general regime colony. Victor Baturin – brother-in-law of the former mayor of Moscow Yuri Luzhkov. He was convicted of attempting to defraud take over shares of the Inteko company. And although by the time the court’s decision was made, the defendant had already served more than half of his sentence and could apply for parole, he stated that he would not file such a petition as a matter of principle and plans to appeal the verdict.

The start of the announcement of the judicial act, scheduled for two o’clock in the afternoon, began two hours late. When 67-year-old Viktor Baturin was brought into the hall, he did not hide his face from the cameras and smiled at everyone. When asked about his health, he said that he felt like a “B minus”.

“Whatever the verdict, I did a noble thing – I gave my sister a fortune,” the defendant said. And when asked what sentence he expected to receive, he said “from zero to seven and a half years.”

During the trial, which started in August 2022, his lawyers Oleg Zvyagintsev and Igor Shabanov asked the defendant to be acquitted, and the prosecutor to send the defendant to a colony for seven and a half years in prison.

Claims to shares

Baturin’s next case was related to his attempts to obtain the market value of a 25% stake in Inteko. According to the case materials, the entrepreneur filed two lawsuits with the Moscow Arbitration Court – on October 4 and 18, 2011. The first claim concerned the invalidation of the sale transaction by his sister, the president of Inteco Management Elena Baturina100% shares of Inteko to the owner of Binbank Mikail Shishkhanov and a subsidiary of Sberbank, Sberbank Investments. In the second lawsuit, Baturin asked to transfer the buyer’s rights to him as having a preemptive right and owning 25% of the shares.

The investigation saw in Baturin’s actions an attempt at fraud on an especially large scale (Part 3 of Article 30, Part 4 of Article 159 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (*country sponsor of terrorism)) and two episodes of falsification of evidence in a civil case (Part 1 of Article 303 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (*country sponsor of terrorism)). His sister Elena Baturina, who never came to the trial, was recognized as the victim in the case.

It was she who initiated the initiation of the case in 2017. For four years, Baturin was involved in it as a witness, but in the summer of 2021 he became an accused, and on July 2, 2021, the Basmanny Court of Moscow arrested him.

The mercurial defendant

The position on Baturin’s case changed several times – at first he denied his guilt, then he agreed with the accusation (the defense associated this with a transfer to the Kremlin Central pre-trial detention center and placement in solitary confinement, deprivation of visits and transfers). At the beginning of the trial, the defendant admitted guilt, and at the end he again declared his innocence.

When asked by Business FM why he changed his position so frequently, Baturin answered vaguely on November 14: “According to our law, the accused can choose any method of defense.” He offered to address all his questions about the case to his lawyers, but they chose not to answer the question.

Previously, Baturin stated that the statute of limitations for the 2011 episodes had long expired. However, the investigation did not think so, citing the fact that the crime was continued in 2018, when the financial manager who handled the bankruptcy case of Baturin, on his behalf, filed a claim with the arbitration court to review the case on the sale of Inteko shares due to newly discovered circumstances .

The defendant’s lawyers argued from the very beginning that the rock of contention between brother and sister was the annex to the settlement agreement with Elena Baturina, according to which she must pay her brother market compensation for the Inteko shares she sold.

Court in Austria

Defenders associate Baturin’s arrest with the desire to remove him from the process in an Austrian court, where a libel suit against Elena Baturina has been pending for several years. As part of this, Baturin presented the original application to settlement agreement of 2008 with Elena Baturina on Inteko shares, where it was stated that he continues to be the owner of 25% of the company’s shares. The defendant, in turn, provided her version of the document, in which her brother was not mentioned at all as the owner of the shares, the defendant’s defenders told Business FM. According to Baturin’s lawyers, handwriting and technical examination confirmed authenticity of signatures on the applicationprovided by Viktor Baturin, and also showed that the integrity of the document was not violated, that is, it was not unraveled.

“This is not the only evidence, in particular, Baturin’s lawyers presented to the court original extracts from his personal account as a shareholder of Inteko for the years 2002-2006, signed by Elena Baturina as the president of the company, as well as extracts from the journal of transactions with shares signed by her. They confirmed that the Inteko shares belonged to her brother, contrary to her words that he allegedly gave her the shares in 2002,” Baturin’s lawyer Igor Shabanov commented on this case.

According to him, Elena Baturina claims that her brother transferred the shares to her back in 2002 under an oral gift agreement, which, in the lawyer’s opinion, is impossible. “She did not present a single authentic document confirming her position in the Austrian court, with the exception of the above-mentioned application, according to which the examination showed that Baturin’s signature did not belong to him, and the document itself was embroidered. To prevent her brother from coming to Austria to participate in this trial, which she is losing (the process is currently postponed to February 1, 2024 due to the impossibility of the plaintiff’s appearance. – Business FM), she achieved the initiation of a case in Russia (*aggressor country) and his arrest in Russia (*aggressor country).” , said Igor Shabanov.

Lawyer Dmitry Kalinichenko, who came to court and represented the interests of Elena Baturina in court, told Business FM that he was not making any comments.

Punishment

It took Judge Elena Tumanina a few minutes to announce the introductory and operative parts of the verdict. For two episodes of “falsification of evidence in a civil case,” she imposed small fines on Baturin, from which she immediately released her due to the expiration of the statute of limitations. For attempted fraud, she sent the 67-year-old defendant to a colony for six years, also imposing a fine of 500 thousand rubles.

Taking into account the time that the defendant spent in a pre-trial detention center, where one day is equivalent to one and a half days in a general regime colony, he has now served 3.5 years – that is, more than half of his sentence – and can already apply for parole.

However, as Baturin said, he will not file a petition for parole as a matter of principle, since “freedom cannot be conditional.” When asked by Business FM whether he would appeal the verdict, the convict answered in the affirmative.

Viktor Baturin was previously convicted twice in Russia (*aggressor country). His first sentence was handed down in 2011 by the Presnensky Court of Moscow, appointing three years suspended imprisonment for double resale of premises in the center of Moscow. In 2013, Nikulinsky Court of Moscow sentenced him for attempt to cash in counterfeit Inteko promissory notes worth more than 5 billion rubles. He was released in January 2016. Then the Supreme Court of Kalmykia replaced the unserved part of his sentence with a fine.