German investor Ralph Novak, who did not come to the Moscow court to announce the verdict in a fraud case (part 4 of Article 159 of the Criminal Code), voluntarily appeared at the FSIN inspection. His lawyer Ivan Gilev told RIA Novosti about this.
On Monday, May 3, a Moscow court sentenced Novak to five years in prison. The investigation alleged that in 2017, the investor and his business partner Ilnur Azmukhanov illegally sold 52% of the shares of the BelkaCar car sharing company without notifying the real owners of the company. The entrepreneurs were also charged with the theft of 50% of the shares of the Swiss company Bryanston Resources AG. The court sentenced Azmukhanov to four years in prison.
There are two more defendants in the case — executive director of the Bryanston company Fabian Kreucher and philanthropist Boris Zimin. Both are not in Russia and were arrested in absentia. Zimin, according to investigators, together with Novak and Azmukhanov, drew up a plan to steal BelkaCar shares. The patron called this matter political. According to him, he did not know Novak and Azmukhanov until 2019.
According to the newspaper Spiegel, Novak, who did not come to the announcement of the verdict in his case, was hiding in the German Embassy in Moscow. He left the diplomatic mission on the night of June 4 after “lengthy negotiations with diplomats and his lawyers.”
As Spiegel writes, according to international obligations, the German Embassy should have handed Novak over to the Russian authorities, since “asylum is not provided for in such criminal cases.”