Pyotr Ofitserov
- Criminal Code
- Article 160 part 4 applied with Article 33 part 5, Russian Criminal Code
- Verdict
- Suspended prison sentence, Fine
- Sentence
- 4 years
- Date of verdict
- 2013-07-17
- Region
- Moscow
- City
- Kirov
Recognition by human rights organisations
- Recognised as persecuted on political groundsby Union of Solidarity with Political Prisoners, 17 October 2013
This is the assessment of the organisation named above, not ours. FACTUM reports it with attribution and does not make its own.
Case summary
In May 2011, it became known that a criminal case had been opened against Ofitserov for causing property damage to the company Kirovles by deception. On 10 April 2012, the case was dismissed for lack of corpus delicti but it was reopened on 29 May 2012 by order of the leadership of the Investigative Committee of Russia. According to the investigation, Pyotr Ofitserov assisted Alexei Navalny by purchasing at market price timber products that had been bought underpriced from Kirovles. The defense argued that the purchase from Kirovles was made at market prices. On 18 July 2013, the Leninsky District Court of Kirov sentenced Ofitserov to four years in prison. Ofitserov was taken into custody in the courtroom, but spent less than a day in the pre-trial detention centre. The next day the court, on the proposal of the prosecutor's office, ruled to release Ofitserov on his own recognisance until the sentence enters into legal force. On 16 October 2013, the Kirov Regional Court replaced Ofitserov's real sentence with a suspended one.
In November 2016, the Supreme Court cancelled the sentence due to the decision of the European Court of Human Rights, which recognised the prosecution as groundless. The Leninsky Court of Kirov began to re-examine the case. On 1 February 2017, the court ruled to release Ofitserov on personal recognisance. On 8 February, he was sentenced to a four-year suspended sentence.
Ofitserov died in July 2018.
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Source: this person’s record in the OVD-Info political persecution database
Published under CC BY 3.0. The criteria for treating a person as politically persecuted belong to OVD-Info; FACTUM relays their assessment and makes none of its own.
OVD-Info has been designated an «extremist» organisation in Russia — by decision of the Russian authorities, like other independent human rights and media projects.