Ousted Russian governor Sergei Furgal has been sentenced to 22 years in prison after being found guilty of attempted murder and ordering contract killings of his business rivals.
Key points:
- Sergei Furgal denied the charges relating to alleged crimes in 2004 and 2005
- Prosecutors found he and his accomplices created a group “to commit murders of competitors”
- His conviction will be appealed, a defence lawyer says
Furgal denied the charges — which related to alleged crimes from 2004 and 2005 — when he was a prominent local businessman in Russia’s far east.
His 2020 arrest sparked a major wave of anti-Kremlin protests in the Khabarovsk region.
“The court established that Furgal and his accomplice, guided by selfish motives and a desire to increase the income of a commercial organisation controlled by him, … created an organised group in 2004 to commit murders of competitors,” Russia’s prosecutor general’s office said in a statement of Telegram.
Speaking at the court outside Moscow, defence lawyer Boris Kozhemyakin said the verdict was “unlawful” and that an appeal would be launched and an aquittal sought.
Furgal, 52, was arrested in July 2020 while governor of the Khabarovsk region, about 6,100 kilometres and seven time zones east of Moscow.
His detention sparked a wave of large protests in the region, with tens of thousands of locals coming out onto the streets for weeks in his support.
His backers said the charges were politically motivated and designed to punish him for taking too independent a line from Moscow.
Representing the ultra-nationalist Liberal Democratic Party, Furgal had won a surprise election victory in 2018, when he rode a wave of anti-Moscow sentiment to oust a sitting pro-Kremlin governor by a landslide margin — a shock result in Russia’s tightly controlled electoral system.
President Vladimir Putin fired Furgal days after his arrest in 2020, citing “loss of trust”, and installed a more pro-Moscow figure in his place.
Reuters