Moscow:
Russian investigators on Tuesday opened a criminal probe into Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, alleging he applied more than 356 million rubles ($4.8 million) of donations to his organisations for individual purposes such as holidays abroad.
The Investigative Committee, which probes important crimes, mentioned in a statement that the revenue was component of more than 588 million rubles Navalny had raised “exclusively” for his non-profit organisations, such as the Anti-Corruption Fund.
The committee mentioned Navalny applied the revenue to obtain “personal property (and) material assets and to pay expenses (including holidays abroad).”
“In this way, the funds collected from citizens were stolen,” the committee added, saying it had opened a criminal case into “fraud on an especially large scale”.
The charge carries a penalty of up to 10 years in prison.
Navalny, 44, is at present recovering from a poisoning try in Germany. He has mentioned he will return to Russia after his wellness is restored.
In August, the Kremlin critic fell violently ill in the course of a flight from Siberia to Moscow and was hospitalised in the city of Omsk just before becoming transferred to Berlin by healthcare aircraft.
Experts in numerous Western nations concluded that he was poisoned with the Soviet-era Novichok nerve agent — a claim that Moscow has repeatedly denied.
Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition figure, has mentioned the most important safety agency Federal Security Service (FSB) was behind the poisoning at the path of President Vladimir Putin.
On Tuesday Navalny described the fresh criminal probe against him as “invented by Putin”.
“Well, I immediately said that they will try to put me in jail because I didn’t die” from the poisoning, he wrote on Twitter.
Navalny has faced charges of fraud just before.
In February 2014 he was charged with fraud and revenue laundering and spent just about a year below residence arrest just before getting a suspended sentence in December that year.
Last year Europe’s tops suitable courts ruled that Russia had violated Navalny’s rights with the case.
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