Former Co-Owner of Rosgosstrakh Sergey Khachaturov Sentenced to Imprisonment

The Dorogomilovsky Court of Moscow has sentenced former Vice President of Rosgosstrakh Sergey Khachaturov to 8 years of imprisonment for multi-million dollar embezzlement and the legalization of criminal proceeds, Interfax reports.

"Khachaturov has received an 8-year prison sentence in a general regime correctional colony," stated Judge Olga Bikovskaya in her ruling.

Another individual involved in the case, Nadezhda Klepalskaya, who is the sister of Svetlana Klepalskaya, the chair of the board of directors of Rosgosstrakh Bank, and the General Director of Technika and Avtomatika LLC, was sentenced to 6 years in prison. The court did not impose additional penalties such as fines or restrictions on activities for the defendants.

Furthermore, the court has seized more than 8 billion rubles from the convicts to compensate for the damages inflicted on the victims (approximately 5.8 billion to Bank FC Okritie and around 2.3 billion to RGS Assets).

According to the verdict, Khachaturov was found guilty of especially large-scale embezzlement (Part 4 of Article 160 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation), particularly large fraud (Part 4 of Article 159 of the Criminal Code), and legalization of criminal proceeds (Part 4, Clause 'b' of Article 174.1 of the Criminal Code). Klepalskaya was found guilty of aiding in embezzlement (Part 4 of Article 160 and Part 5 of Article 33), fraud, and legalization of proceeds.

The court established that from January 2017 to April 2018, Khachaturov, while serving as the General Director of RGS Assets and Vice President of Rosgosstrakh, along with Klepalskaya and other accomplices, embezzled more than 18,000 investment shares from the Nevsky Closed Investment Fund, valued at over 2 billion 290.7 million rubles. Additionally, they fraudulently hijacked over 15 million shares of Rosgosstrakh, exceeding a value of 5 billion 779 million rubles. Subsequently, the convicts legalized the acquired funds.

Khachaturov and Klepalskaya, who were detained in spring 2018, pleaded not guilty.

Khachaturov's attorney Alexander Gofshtein announced to Interfax that the verdict will be appealed. "We will certainly appeal the verdict. This document evokes nothing but regret and bitterness," Gofshtein stated. In his opinion, "such verdicts poison the business environment and investment attractiveness of Russia as a state. It is regrettable that, in reaching a verdict, the court treated the fate of two innocent people so harshly, contrary to the law and the existing evidence."