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Alexei Kozlov

Fyodor Savintsev

Alexei  Kozlov is a prom­in­ent Rus­sian busi­ness­man in the con­struc­tion sec­tor, believed by human rights groups to have suffered from a con­spir­acy to expro­pri­ate his prop­erty. On Thursday, March, 14 the judge presid­ing over the retrial of former busi­ness­man Alexei Kozlov issued an uphold­ing Kozlov’s 2008 con­vic­tion on fraud and money-laundering charges and hand­ing him a five-year prison sen­tence.
Rus­sian Dis­trict Court judge  read out the ver­dict for more than an hour in front of Kozlov and his wife, Olga Roman­ova, a prom­in­ent journ­al­ist.
Olga Roman­ova has writ­ten for Novaya Gaz­eta about the ordeals exper­i­enced by her hus­band and her­self, includ­ing the pres­sure on her to bribe offi­cials. Oppos­i­tion thinks that happened because Olga Roman­ova is a key fig­ure in the oppos­i­tion move­ment against President-elect Vladi­mir Putin, the out­come of the high-profile case is widely seen as the first hint of how Putin plans to deal with chal­lenges to his rule.