Moscow Times - 09.01.2003

 

 

 

 

Moscow Times

Gusinsky Walks Free on Bail



By Simon Saradzhyan, Staff Writer

An Athens court freed Vladimir Gusinsky on bail Friday as Russian prosecutors continued to draft a request to extradite him to Moscow to face multimillion-dollar fraud charges.

Casually dressed in blue jeans and a bright blue T-shirt, a smiling Gusinsky made no comment as he walked out of the maximum-security Korydallos prison with his lawyers and headed for a luxury hotel. 

"Mr. Gusinsky was ordered to be released on a 100,000 euro ($108,200) bail," his Greek lawyer Alexandros Likourezos said, Reuters reported. "He will stay in an Athens hotel and is not allowed to leave the country." 

A council of three appellate judges accepted an argument from Gusinsky's lawyers that the former media magnate was not a flight risk and could not look after his business interests from prison.

Gusinsky, 51, was arrested at the Athens international airport on Aug. 21 after arriving on a flight from Tel Aviv, reportedly for a family vacation. 

He had been jailed in the hospital wing of Korydallos since Aug. 25.

Gusinsky was to have checked into the five-star Athenaeum InterContinental, but the hotel switchboard maintained Friday and Sunday that he was not staying there. 

Russian prosecutors, meanwhile, said they soon will send Greece a formal extradition request within a week and a half.

"If they release him, they release him. But they will not release the Prosecutor General's Office of the responsibility of trying to extradite him," Prosecutor General's Office representative Alexander Zhumaty was quoted as saying by Kommersant in Saturday's issue.

Reached by telephone Friday, Zhumaty said the extradition request still needs to be drawn up and translated into Greek.

He also said prosecutors have yet to decide whether to send investigators involved in the Gusinsky case to Greece.

Asked about a Russian-Greek agreement that gives either country 30 days from the day a suspect is detained to request his extradition, Zhumaty replied, "All I can say is that we will meet the deadline set by the agreement." 

Gusinsky was detained when passport officials found his name in their computers and contacted Russian law enforcers, who said he was wanted in Russia.

The Prosecutor General's Office charged Gusinsky in 2000 with embezzling a $250 million loan from state-controlled Gazprom that was intended for his Media-MOST empire, which at the time included NTV television, Ekho Moskvy radio and other media outlets. Prosecutors then charged him the next year with laundering $97 million.

Gusinsky and his supporters have denounced the charges as a politically motivated attack aimed to muzzle his media's critical reports of the government and the war in Chechnya.

While the charges may have been prompted by a Kremlin attempt to gain control of Gusinsky's debt-ridden empire, the current effort to have him extradited is caused more by inertia, said Alexei Makarkin, analyst with the Center for Political Technologies. 

Having given up most of his media assets in Russia, Gusinsky no longer poses any serious threat to the Kremlin. 

But prosecutors simply have no choice but to continue pressing ahead with his case, Makarkin said, pointing out that if they had declined to seek extradition, embarrassing questions would arise about why the charges were filed in the first place. 

"Of the two evils, they have chosen the lesser one," Makarkin said. 

Thus, he said, prosecutors will continue to seek extradition even though their chances appear bleak, given that a Spanish court rejected a similar request in 2001 and that Interpol has refused to issue an international warrant, saying the case against Gusinsky is politically motivated.