Lithuanian Court Refuses to Extradite
Former Yukos Banker
Created: 23.10.2006 20:09 MSK (GMT +3), Updated: 20:09
MSK
, 4 hours 4 minutes ago
MosNews
A former Yukos banker wanted in Russia on embezzlement charges
will not be extradited, 
Lithuanias
Court of Appeal quoted by RIA Novosti ruled Monday.
Lithuania granted
provisional asylum last October to Igor Babenko, 55, a former manager of the
embattled oil company Yukos
Menatep St. Petersburg bank affiliate in southern Russia, and last week the
countrys Supreme Administrative Court upheld his political asylum.
In
Russia Babenko, who was born in Lithuania, is accused of issuing loans worth 119
million rubles ($4.42 million) to two companies in league with their executives,
who allegedly pocketed the money. Russian investigators estimated the value of
other schemes involving the banker at 214 million rubles (about $8 million).
On October 18, a Lithuanian prosecutor released Babenko from custody on
condition he not leave the country.
Babenko has dismissed the charges
against him as political. His lawyer said earlier the banker is being prosecuted
only because he headed an affiliate of the bank connected with imprisoned Yukos
founder Mikhail
Khodorkovskys inner circle.
But the Trust bank, formerly
known as Menatep St. Petersburg, said the case is not politically motivated.
Yekaterina Tolkunova, the banks marketing director, said earlier the case is a
felony, pure and simple.
An in-house probe into the missing loans has
revealed that controversial local businessmen were behind the firms that
received them, Tolkunova said.
Lithuanian authorities arrested Babenko
in July 2005 after a Russian court issued an arrest warrant and put the banker
and his associates on an international wanted list.
In September, a
Vilnius district court ruled to extradite Babenko to Russia, saying Russian
authorities had provided convincing evidence. But an appeals court in the Baltic
state put the extradition order on hold pending an asylum
ruling.
Meanwhile, prosecutors have searched the country house of a vice
president of the bankrupt company, RIA Novosti adds.
The search of
[Mikhail] Shestopalovs dacha was conducted October 18. Investigators did not
find the two pistols he had been presented with while working in the Interior
Ministry, but they confiscated other arms, Boris Kuznetsov said.
He said
Shestopalov was not in Russia, and that prosecutors broke into the house,
prohibiting the vice presidents wife from entering.
Kuznetsov added that
he has filed a complaint against investigators and has proposed handing over the
pistols they failed to find, but the Prosecutors General Office refused to
accept them.
He said the search was illegal and suggested that it was
related to the case of Leonid Nevzlin, Yukos core shareholder, who is currently
living in Israel and is on the international wanted list.
Nevzlin
has been charged with fraud and involvement in a number of contract killings,
and was put on the international wanted list July 21, 2004.
Israel has
refused to extradite him to Russia.
The Prosecutors General Office has
offered no comment on the search so far.
