Navalny lawyer: forwarding Bastrykin affair to prosecutor's office pointless
MOSCOW. Aug 1 (Interfax) - The Kremlin's forwarding to the Office of the Prosecutor General of a letter from opposition activist Alexei Navalny about the Russian chief criminal investigator's alleged business interests in the Czech Republic is a "meaningless formality," Navalny's lawyer said on Wednesday.
Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said earlier on Wednesday that the letters department of the president's office had received a 100-page letter from Navalny with allegations that Alexander Bastrykin, head of the Investigative Committee, had owned property in the Czech Republic and used to have residency in that country.
"The letters department will forward this letter to the prosecutor's office for an investigation," Peskov told reporters.
"We see this as unsatisfactory. The presidential administration is a body that resends all appeals somewhere. In effect, it's just a meaningless formality," Navalny's lawyer, Vadim Kobzev, told Interfax.
It is not part of the duties of the Office of the Prosecutor General to check reports on alleged crimes because that is the job of criminal investigation authorities, Kobzev said.
"It is, actually, for this reason that we don't expect this to get us anywhere. One letter was sent to the Russian Investigative Committee and one to the president. We deliberately didn't send it to the Office of the Prosecutor General because in this situation its functions are of no use to us," he said.
In 2008, Alexander Khinshtein, a State Duma deputy and a member of the United Russia party, asked the Prosecutor General's Office to check the same allegations about Bastrykin, but his request was turned down, the lawyer mentioned.
"The prosecutor's office told him, we can't check Bastrykin at all, and so we won't check him. I expect that we will have the same kind of reply," Kobzev said.
On July 27, Russian business daily Vedomosti carried an article citing Navalny as saying Bastrykin "owned a stake in a business in the Czech Republic," and that "deals with that stake were based on fake power of attorney documents from him."
Bastrykin told Moscow daily Izvestia it was "completely untrue" that he had sold real estate in the Czech Republic via straw parties and that he had had residency in the Eastern European country.
He admitted that he had owned an apartment with floor space of 46 square meters in the Czech Republic.
"I think I acquired it in 2000, when I wasn't a state official yet but was a professor at the Northwestern Branch of the Russian Academy of Law. I was buying it in installments - I paid installments for two years since 1998. It cost $67,000 if I'm not mistaken," he said.
Bastrykin said that at that time he wanted to work in Europe and planned to be a visiting professor.
Asked why he had a business registered in the Czech Republic, he said he had needed this to obtain a "long-term visa."
He said he had bought his apartment in that country for the same purpose.
Today the apartment's official owner is his ex-wife, Natalya Nikolayevna Bastrykina, Bastrykin said.
"She and I haven't been together for 22 years. She has her own family, I have my own with Olga Ivanovna Alexandrova. We have two children. I never sold the apartment, I just handed it over to my first wife. We are still friends. If I haven't sold the apartment I don't have to pay any taxes either," Bastrykin said.
He said he would resign if anyone proved he had received any commercial profit, even though it were just one euro.
