There are still at least another day and a half before the closing statement and the judge’s retirement to deliberate the verdict, but it is already fair to say that the “Kirovles-2” trial has successfully come to an end.
Successfully, that is, for those who fabricated this case and restarted it after we won in the European Court of Human Rights.
A summary of the case, as a reminder, is here. And it is all very simple: Navalny created a criminal group and forced the company to sell timber more cheaply (at an unfavorable price) to his alleged accomplice, Ofitserov.
Both last time and this time, from the very first day of the trial, we have been saying the same thing: let’s look at Kirovles’s sale prices, and then everyone will be able to see that Ofitserov bought the products at the average price. Ofitserov accounted for only 3% of the company’s annual sales, and a huge share of the remaining 97% was sold at an even lower price.
It is very simple and instantly settles the question of whether the charges hold up.
That is precisely why we are not being given those documents, and the court absolutely refuses to request them. The prosecution is adamantly opposed to obtaining and entering these documents into the record (hardly surprising).
And just now we have reached this moment of truth in the “Kirovles-2” case as well. Exactly the same thing happened as in the first trial.
The judge went off to deliberate “for 15 minutes.”
He came back 50 minutes later and delivered his ruling: no, absolutely not. He has no desire to request or know anything about Kirovles’s documents or prices.
The rest of the proceedings have simply lost all meaning. From this point on, it is just empty formalism meant to create the appearance that there is a real court here.
The verdict will be guilty.
P.S. A video livestream of the trial is here. Reports from yesterday’s hearing are here and here.
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