Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny filed a lawsuit to the Russian petrochemical giant Sibur against Russian President Vladimir Putin after a company in which the Russian leader's son-in-law is a shareholder received $1.75 billion in state support.
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny filed a lawsuit to the Russian petrochemical giant Sibur against Russian President Vladimir Putin after a company in which the Russian leader's son-in-law is a shareholder received $1.75 billion in state support.
According to Reuters, Putin's son-in-law, Kirill Shamalov, is a major shareholder in petrochemicals producer Sibur, which received $1.75 billion in funding from Russia's National Wealth Fund at an unusually low interest rate last year.
"We consider the president's inactivity to be illegal, because when the funds were being appropriated, he failed to make his potential conflict of interest known, but [Russian] anti-corruption legislation obliges one to notify, even about a possible conflicts of interest," a lawyer for Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation Ivan Zhdanov told RIA Novosti.
Navalny said Russia's president violated the law on counteracting corruption. "Kirill Shamalov is the spouse of Putin's daughter. Putin giving money to a company where the beneficiary is his child's partner is a classic conflict of interest. Straight out of a textbook," Navalny wrote in a post on his blog.
The Moscow Times informs that Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Putin was not aware of the lawsuit.
