The Zamoskvoretsky District Court of Moscow ordered Shorin held in custody for two months, according to Kommersant. The charge falls under Part 4 of Article 159 of the Russian Criminal Code, which covers fraud committed on an especially large scale and carries a maximum sentence of ten years in prison.
The outlet did not specify what the accusation relates to, and it remains unclear whether the case is connected to Shorin's work as head of the library.
Officials at the Library for Natural Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences (BEN RAN) told Kommersant they were unaware of what prompted the criminal prosecution of their former director.
Shorin took charge of BEN RAN in 2017 and oversaw its digitization before leaving the post in December 2023. According to Kommersant, the Khamovnichesky District Court of Moscow fined BEN RAN 141,000 rubles in June 2023 for the misuse of 2.8 million rubles in budget funds.
Before joining the academic library, Shorin headed Vivaldi, a Moscow-based software development company. A graduate of the computational mathematics and cybernetics faculty at Lomonosov Moscow State University, he worked at the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg from 2011 to 2018.
After leaving BEN RAN, Shorin became director for digital transformation at Rently, where he was responsible for the strategic development of a cloud-based SaaS platform, Kommersant notes.