The pro-Kremlin youth movement Nashi (Ours) on Tuesday initiated legal action to expel opposition figurehead Alexei Navalny from the board of directors of Russia’s largest airline Aeroflot.
Nashi commissar Konstantin Goloskokov has filed lawsuits at Moscow’s Presnya and Taganka district courts, also demanding that Navalny be removed from his position as director of the Anticorruption Foundation, since under Russian law a lawyer may not engage in any other activities.
Legal expert Alexander Glushenkov told the Rapsi legal news agency on Tuesday that Navalny’s status as a lawyer is not an impediment to his position on Aeroflot’s board, since it is an elected position.
Navalny was nominated by the National Reserve Bank, controlled by businessman Alexander Lebedev who controls about 15 percent of the Russian flagship airline. A controlling stake of 51.17 percent is held by the Russian government.
Last Tuesday Navalny was charged with embezzlement and ordered not to leave Moscow. The blogger said he was initially accused of causing one million rubles (around $30,000) in damage but now the charge has been redefined as “acting in criminal collusion” with the figure upped to 16 million rubles.
Navalny, a corruption-fighting lawyer, is suspected of pressuring the state-run Kirovles timber company in the Kirov Region into a disadvantageous deal when he was a pro bono advisor to Governor Nikita Belykh in 2009. Navalny faces up to five years in prison if convicted.
The case was dropped by regional investigators in April, but reopened in July on orders from Investigative Committee chief Alexander Bastrykin. The move came shortly after Navalny accused Bastrykin of professional misconduct, including threatening Novaya Gazeta journalist, in June.
Well known as an anti-corruption blogger, Navalny has sought over the past few years to obtain documents via court rulings from a number of state-run companies, in a bid to make their activities transparent. As a minority shareholder in state-run oil major Rosneft, Navalny attempted to get the minutes of the company’s board meetings for 2009, and also copies of agreements on crude oil supplies to China.
Navalny has also been a leading figure in the protest movement which emerged in Russia after last year’s parliamentary elections. Rosneft President Igor Sechin has accused Navalny of working for London-based Hermitage Capital, the company at the center of the Magnitsky scandal, a charge he has denied.