The Tverskoy District Court of Moscow changed the measure of restraint from a pre-trial detention center to house arrest for former municipal deputy Ketevan Kharaidze. A listener from the courtroom reported this to Mediazona.
Her lawyer Evgeniy Kronov asked Kharaidze to change the preventive measure, writes SotaVision. He recalled that the deputy was under house arrest during the first consideration of the case, and she was sent to a pre-trial detention center due to the imposition of a real term of imprisonment.
Photo: Alexandra Astakhova/Mediazona
The victim's representative and the prosecutor demanded that Kharaidze be kept in custody, believing that she could abscond or influence the course of the trial.In December 2022, Kharaidze, who fought against infill development in Moscow, was sentenced to four years in a general regime colony in a fraud case (Part 4 of Article 159 of the Criminal Code). According to investigators, she fraudulently extorted 15 million rubles from Andrei Stepanov, a representative of the development company Stone Hedge. The prosecution alleged that the deputy took advantage of the company’s conflict with area residents who were dissatisfied with the construction of an elite residential complex.
The case against Kharaidze was opened in the summer of 2021 — after she announced plans to participate in the State Duma elections. After a search in June, she was sent to a pre-trial detention center, where the deputy went on a hunger strike for a week and a half to protest her arrest. A month later she was released under house arrest, and in September Kharaidze again won municipal elections in her district.
In May 2024, the court “due to the discrepancy between the conclusions of the [first instance] court and the actual circumstances of the case” overturned the deputy’s sentence and sent the case for a new trial.
Old pipes, 10 thousand in a coat pocket and Duma elections. What do we know about the case against MP Ketevan Kharaydze