Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny blocked from running against Putin in 2018 after fraud verdict

Navalny was accused of embezzling timber worth about £215,000

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny speaks in the court in Kirov, Russia, Wednesday, 8 February 2017 (AP)

A Russian court on Wednesday found opposition leader Alexei Navalny guilty in the retrial of a 2013 fraud case, which formally disqualifies him as a candidate for president next year.

However, the first time Navalny was convicted, his sentence was suspended and he was allowed to be a candidate for mayor of Moscow. An associate said Navalny will carry on with the presidential campaign he announced in December.

In a webcast hearing in Kirov, a city nearly 800km (500 miles) east of Moscow, Judge Alexei Vtyurin found Navalny guilty of embezzling timber worth 16 million rubles (£215,000) and gave him a five-year suspended sentence. The previous guilty verdict was overturned by the European Court of Human Rights which ruled that Russia violated Navalny’s right to a fair trial.

During a break in the proceedings, Navalny told reporters that he and his lawyers had compared this verdict with the text of the 2013 verdict and found them to be identical.

“You can come over and see that the judge is reading exactly the same text, which says a lot about the whole trial,” Navalny told reporters, adding that even the typos in the names of companies were identical in both rulings.

Navalny, the driving force behind massive anti-government protests in Moscow in 2011 and 2012, had announced plans to run for office in December and had begun to raise funds.

Navalny’s campaign manager, Leonid Volkov, insisted that the campaign goes on even though the guilty verdict formally bars Navalny from running.

In a post on Facebook, Volkov said that the Kremlin will ultimately decide whether Navalny will be confirmed as a presidential candidate.

“This is the political decision we need to win by campaigning,” he said.

Navalny’s plans to run in the 2013 Moscow mayoral election were shattered when the Kirov court found him guilty and sent him to prison. But after he spent a night in jail, the court held an emergency hearing and released Navalny on a suspended sentence.

The unusual move was seen by observers as the Kremlin’s decision to allow him to run against its candidate in the mayoral race in order to make it look more legitimate. Navalny came in second, garnering about a third of the vote.

Associated Press