A Russian court released former Yukos Deputy Manager Alexei Kurtsin on parole, the Echo of Moscow radio station reported on Tuesday, citing the executive’s former lawyer Roman Golovtsev.
The decision was made by the Ryazan District Court. Kurtsin has served almost eight years in prison, the lawyer said.
Lawyer Yury Larin, who represented Kurtsin, confirmed to the RAPSI court news agency that the court ruled to release the former Yukos manager on parole.
“I’m glad Kurtsin has been released,” Larin said. The former manager had applied for parole at the start of the year.
In June, The Moscow City Court mitigated Kurtsin’s punishment to 12.5 years at a medium security prison for embezzling Yukos’s money and ordered him to pay a fine of one million rubles ($34,000).
Kurtsin was sentenced to 15.5 years in a maximum security prison in January 2010, but the Moscow City Court softened the sentence after criminal legislation was liberalized and the offence was reclassified.
Kurtsin has two other convictions pertaining to his activities at Yukos. In December 2008 he was sentenced to 12 years for embezzling and laundering 74 million rubles ($2.6 million), while in December 2005 he received a 14-year-long sentence for embezzling and laundering 343 million rubles ($12 million) belonging to Yukos.
In the latest case, Kurtsin and his co-defendants were found guilty of stealing 49 million rubles by transferring the funds to bank accounts belonging to two fake NGOs: the Democratic Union and the Sports Car Club Track.
Legal proceedings launched against Yukos in 2003, which many view as politically motivated, resulted in convictions for many executives and shareholders of what was Russia’s largest oil producer, including its founder and CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
Khodorkovsky was jailed for eight years in 2005 for fraud and tax evasion. He was sentenced again to seven years at a second trial in December 2010 (later reduced to six years), and is expected to remain in prison until 2016.
Khodorkovsky says he is the victim of a politically-motivated campaign, a charge that the authorities deny.