Putin chief opponent detained at protest

Rally came after campaigner was given suspended term for fraud.

Police in Russia have detained president Vladimir Putin’s chief opponent after he broke the terms of his house arrest to attend a protest of several thousand people outside the Kremlin.

The unsanctioned rally in Moscow came hours after anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny was found guilty of fraud and given a suspended sentence of three and a half years. His brother was sent to prison. The convictions are widely seen as part of a political vendetta against any opposition to Putin and his government.

Navalny, who has been under house arrest since February, broke its terms to attend the demonstration and was rounded up by police as he approached the site of the protest.

He and his younger brother Oleg were convicted of defrauding a French cosmetics company and given the same sentence as each other, but the younger man’s term was not suspended.

The court fined them 500,000 rubles (about €7,400) each and ordered them to pay 4m roubles in damages.

The verdict was scheduled for next month, but the court session was abruptly moved forward to today , the main holiday in Russia, leading to speculation that authorities wanted to head off protests.

Oleg Navalny, the father of two young children and a former executive of the state-owned postal service, has never played a role in the Russian opposition movement and his imprisonment could echo the Soviet-era practice of punishing the relatives of inconvenient people.

“Aren’t you ashamed of what you’re doing? You want to punish me even harder?” Alexei Navalny shouted as Judge Yelena Korobchenko handed down the sentence for his brother. Alexei briefly entered the metal cage his brother was put into and appeared to be holding back tears.

“This is the most disgusting and vile of all possible verdicts,” he said outside the court. “The government isn’t just trying to jail its political opponents — we’re used to it, we’re aware that they’re doing it — but this time they’re destroying and torturing the families of the people who oppose them.”

The suspended sentence means it could be converted into a prison term at any moment if Alexei Navalny offends again, although this will be up to the court to decide.

His lawyer, Vadim Kobzev, said he would remain under house arrest until all appeals are exhausted, which could take months. The trial seemed to be full of inconsistencies and loopholes.

The company involved, Yves Rocher, wrote a complaint to investigators, but its representatives have insisted throughout the trial that there never were any damages. The French executive who wrote the complaint left Russia shortly afterwards and never attended the hearings.

Prosecutors said the brothers forced the company “into disadvantageous contracts” and defrauded it of 26m roubles.

Alexei Navalny, a lawyer and popular blogger, rose to prominence with his investigations of official corruption and played a leading role in organising massive anti-Putin demonstrations in Moscow in 2011 and 2012.

In a trial last year in a different criminal case, he was found guilty of embezzlement and sentenced to prison, but he was released the next day after thousands of people protested in the streets of Moscow. He was then handed a suspended sentence and finished a strong second in the capital’s mayoral election in September last year.

Russian tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who spent 10 years in jail before he was pardoned last year, dismissed the verdict as the Russian leader’s revenge for Navalny’s activism. He said he is “not even surprised that Putin and his entourage are capable of vile tricks, deception, forgery and manipulation — they are not capable of anything else”.

New York-based Human Rights Watch said the verdict sends a message “to independent voices to expect a harsher crackdown in 2015”.