The regional court declared illegal the verdict in the case of embezzlement of half a billion rubles in the Kronotsky Reserve. Thus, the criminal case against four employees of the reserve will be re-examined on the merits, but in a different judicial composition. All defendants on February 7 were released from custody in the courtroom.
In the summer of 2022, the Kamchatka City Court found Daria Panicheva, Roman Korchigin, Oksana Terekhova and Nikolai Pozdnyakov guilty of embezzling 450 million rubles. in the period from 2015 to 2016 and sentenced them to real terms of imprisonment from 3 to 5.5 years. The court found that the environmentalists during this period created “the appearance of waste disposal by a commercial company, in fact, burying them in a specially protected reserve territory.” None of the defendants pleaded guilty. The defense insisted that the ecologists’ guilt was not proven and asked for additional expert examinations in the case. Last autumn, at the initiative of the Ministry of Natural Resources of Russia, an examination was carried out on the ground, which showed that there were no buried wastes on the territory, and work to eliminate the accumulated environmental damage was carried out.
The governor of Kamchatka, Vladimir Solodov, also expressed support for the staff of the reserve.
After reviewing the new evidence, the state prosecution considered it possible to commute the sentence and asked for suspended sentences for the environmentalists. Despite this, the Court of Appeal ruled to overturn the verdict and sent the case back for retrial.
“For us, this is very important and the first step towards justice. People will finally return home and to their favorite work. This is very important because we are already burnt out. We are so tired of fighting and proving that people were just doing their duty, ”Peter Shpilenok, an employee and ex-director of the Kronotsky Reserve, a member of the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation, told Vedomosti. According to him, there were violations, but not such as to imprison people and impose huge fines on them. “We will not stop there and will continue to seek justice,” he concluded.
After the verdict, Shpilenok resigned as director of the reserve in protest.