Alexei Navalny fell ill on August 20 on a plane and was taken to hospital in a coma.
Moscow:
A Russian court has frozen the assets of opposition leader Alexei Navalny while he was in a coma in a German hospital, his spokesperson said Thursday.
The spokeswoman for politician and anti-corruption activist Kira Yarmysh said in a video statement that on August 27, “bailiffs announced a ban” on transactions involving her part in an apartment in the suburbs of Moscow.
“At the same time, Alexei’s accounts have been frozen,” she said.
The legal ruling against Navalny means his family’s apartment in a multi-story apartment building in southeast Moscow cannot be sold, given as a gift, or used to take out a mortgage, Yarmysh said.
She told AFP that the move did not prevent Navalny from living there.
He fell ill on August 20 on a plane and was taken to hospital in a coma in Siberia for two days before being airlifted to Berlin, where tests revealed he had been poisoned with the Novichok nerve agent.
The German hospital announced he was released from a coma on September 7.
Its allies and senior international officials have said the onus is on Russia to prove the poisoning was not state ordered and conduct a proper investigation, while Russia says it needs evidence from tests in Germany and other countries to do so.
Doctors at Berlin’s Charite Hospital said on Wednesday Navalny had been released. He will remain in Germany for the moment to continue the outpatient treatment.
The Kremlin said on Wednesday that Navalny was free to return to Russia.
Yarmysh told AFP earlier that the politician intends to return to his home country, where he and his allies have been the target of legal proceedings and house searches and served short sentences behind bars.
The actions of the judicial officers are the result of a court ruling in October last year according to which Navalny, his ally Lyubov Sobol and the anti-corruption Foundation he founded must jointly pay nearly 88 million rubles ($ 1.2 million) to Moskovsky Shkolnik, a catering company that makes school dinners.
The company continued a video investigation by Navalny’s team that it made inferior food that made children sick.
Kremlin-related businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin said he paid the catering company and would claim reimbursement.
Sobol said in late August that bailiffs debited all of her bank accounts for her share of the money, leaving her in the red.
In an attempt to avoid paying the fine, the Anti-Corruption Foundation changed its legal status.
(This story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
