Court in Budyonnovsk amnesties Lyudmila Bogatenkova

The court acquitted Lyudmila Bogatenkova on one of the episodes of her fraud case; and re-qualified the charge on the other episode; and applied the amnesty act.

The "Caucasian Knot" has reported that the investigation against Bogatenkova was launched in October 2014. She was charged with two episodes of a fraud: in one of them, she allegedly refused to repay her 100,000-rouble debt; the second was based on the allegation of one of her wards that she had stolen the royalty for providing legal services. Lyudmila herself associates the prosecution with her professional human rights activities.

On June 3, the prosecutor demanded 2.5 years in prison for her. Bogatenkova drew attention of the court, in her last plea, to the fact that the public prosecutor had in fact failed to overturn the arguments of her innocence presented by the defence.

According to advocate Vitaly Zubenko, the city court of Budyonnovsk found Bogatenkova guilty of committing one episode of fraud and sentenced her to one year of conditional imprisonment; but she was released from this punishment because of amnesty. The issue of appealing against the ruling regarding the amnesty is not yet solved, the RAPSI reports with reference to the defence.

Full text of the article is available on the Russian page of 24/7 Internet agency ‘Caucasian Knot’.