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Arrest of Russian Opposition Leader Raises Tough Questions for Country’s Legal System

The AM Law Daily

Russian prosecutors charged anticorruption lawyer and blogger Alexei Navalny, one of President Vladimir Putin’s harshest critics, with embezzlement Tuesday in connection with a 2009 timber deal in which he participated as an unpaid adviser.

The criminal charges, which carry a five-to-10 year prison term, are the latest to be lodged against a vocal Kremlin critic and have some U.S. lawyers with Russian expertise skeptical about the country’s commitment to the rule of law.

“Russia is falling into a dictatorship and [Navalny’s] arrest is entirely political,” says Jamison Firestone, the cofounder and managing partner of Moscow-based law and accounting firm Firestone Duncan, who fled Moscow for London in 2010 after he discovered that someone was trying to obtain a $21.5 million fraudulent tax refund by forging his signature on client documents and the authorities refused to act. “At its best, the indictment says to Navalny that if you continue to open your mouth, you’re going to prison. At its worst, he’s already going to prison.”

The Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation—a body akin to the Federal Bureau of Investigation—filed the charges against Navalny under Article 160 of Russia’s criminal code, according to a press release outlining the allegations. Prosecutors claim Navalny embezzled roughly $500,000 from the regional government of Kirov, a province just west of the Ural Mountains, by participating in a scheme to steal timber from a state-owned company.

Navalny, who has publicly described the charges as “strange and absurd,” has been released by Russian authorities and agreed not to leave Moscow while his case is pending. Regional prosecutors in Russia previously investigated similar charges against Navalny before dropping the matter, according to news reports. But as a leading Putin and anticorruption crusader—Time once called Navalny “Russia’s Erin Brockovich” for taking on corporate greed—Navalny continued to draw the interest of those loyal to the government.