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The Second Court of Cassation of General Jurisdiction overturned the measure of restraint in the form of a ban on certain actions to the founder of Baring Vostok, Michael Calvey. About it informs Interfax.
“The Judicial Collegium for Criminal Cases satisfied the cassation appeal of the defense and canceled the preventive measure against the convicted person under the verdict of the Meshchansky Court of Moscow dated August 5, 2021,” the press service of the cassation court told the agency.
A criminal case against Michael Calvey and other defendants was initiated in February 2019 at the request of Sherzod Yusupov, a shareholder of Vostochny Bank. Initially, they were accused of fraud, later the charge was reclassified as embezzlement. The investigation claimed that Calvey convinced the board of directors of Vostochny Bank to cede a loan of 2.5 billion rubles to the First Collection Bureau controlled by him in exchange for shares in the IFTG investment fund worth 600 million rubles. Money, as investigators believed, Calvey and his accomplices appropriated.
Calvey connected the criminal case initiated against him with the conflict of shareholders. Until recently, the main owners of Vostochny were, on the one hand, the Finvision company of businessman Artem Avetisyan and his minority partners, and on the other, the investment fund Baring Vostok, founded by Michael Calvey in the 1990s.
In 2016, the parties merged their banking assets in Vostochny, but soon Baring had claims to Avetisyan’s past business transactions. They, in particular, concerned the practice of buying out shares in the companies of entrepreneurs from the “Club of Leaders” of the Agency for Strategic Initiatives, where Avetisyan heads the “New Business” direction. Finvision filed retaliatory claims, as a result of which disputes were considered in British and Russian courts and other jurisdictions. After a three-year conflict, the parties concluded a settlement agreement only at the end of 2020.
“The only argument of the prosecution about the criminal group was that my colleagues and I are business sharks. There is no other evidence for the prosecution. Business sharks means a criminal group. They didn’t even try to prove anything – neither the role of everyone in the group, nor the interaction, nor the performed actions of this group. And the idea that I am a “shark” is simply absurd; many leading figures of the Russian business community, including German Gref, Kirill Dmitriev, Andrey Kostin, Oleg Tinkov and many others, spoke publicly about my honesty,” he said.
Calvey said he worked in Russia because he believed in its great economic future, adding that “even after 2014, when the geopolitical climate worsened and sanctions were imposed on Russia,” he “continued to defend the image of Russia as an attractive country for work and investment.
In 2021, the Meshchansky Court of Moscow sentenced all defendants to suspended sentences. Calvey received five and a half years. The court retained for the defendants in the case the previously chosen measure of restraint in the form of a ban on certain actions.
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