The Lefortovo District Court of Moscow suspended proceedings in singer Larisa Dolina's lawsuit seeking damages from Dmitry Leontyev, TV channel REN TV reported, citing a court correspondent.
The reason is that Leontyev signed a contract with the Defense Ministry and went to fight in the war in Ukraine, TASS reported from the courtroom.
In November 2025, Leontyev was sentenced to seven years in a penal colony and fined 900,000 rubles. Investigators believe he was a "dropper" — a person to whom a victim transfers money to an account, who then passes it to the scheme's organizers. Leontyev himself claimed he did not know about the fraudulent scheme and was following instructions from people who posed as Federal Security Service (FSB) officers.
The cases of the other three defendants were combined into a single proceeding, which the court will hear in August.
In summer 2024, unknown individuals persuaded Dolina to transfer money to "safe accounts" and sell her apartment in Khamovniki below market value — for 112 million rubles instead of 138 million. One of the fraudsters sent the singer a fake passport with a photo of British actor Tom Holland. Dolina transferred the proceeds along with part of her savings to the fraudsters.
The apartment's buyer, Polina Lurie, spent nearly two years defending her right to the property in courts: Dolina tried to have the deal declared invalid. In December 2025, the Supreme Court sided with Lurie. The scheme in which a defrauded seller tries to reclaim sold property through court became known as the "Dolina effect."