Alexei Navalny: Putin critic could get up to 13 years in jail for fraud conviction
Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny was found guilty of fraud on Tuesday in a case that could earn him up to 13 years in prison.
Navalny is already serving a two-and-a-half-year sentence for another fraud.
He says both cases are fabricated in a bid to silence him.
"Navalny committed a fraud, the theft of property from others by an organised group," said judge Margarita Kotova, according to an AFP journalist present in court.
The reading of the judgment until the announcement of the sentence could take several hours. The prosecution had requested 13 years in prison for "fraud" and "offending" a magistrate.
Navalny, 45, has been on trial since mid-February within walls of his penal colony 100 km east of Moscow.
An activist renowned for his scathing investigations into corruption and the lifestyle of Russian elites, Navalny survived a serious poisoning in 2020, for which he holds President Vladimir Putin responsible. He was arrested in early 2021, upon his return to Moscow, after recovering in Germany.
Investigators accuse him of embezzling millions of roubles in donations to his anti-corruption organisations and of "contempt of court" during one of his previous hearings.
Other critical voices have been targeted by Moscow in recent months, including NGOs and independent media outlets.
On Monday, Instagram and Facebook were banned after their parent company Meta was declared an "extremist organisation" by a Moscow court.
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