Ponomaryov Konstantin Anatolevich

On June 6, 2017, 45-year-old businessman Konstantin Ponomarev and his lawyer, Maxim Zagorsky, were arrested in Moscow. They were charged with knowingly making a false denunciation and organizing a knowingly making a false denunciation as part of an organized group, fabricating evidence, tax evasion, money laundering, fraud, and attempted fraud. According to investigators, Ponomarev and Zagorsky created an organized group to obtain court rulings favorable to Ponomarev. They planned to use these rulings as prejudicial actions in other legal disputes with IKEA and tax authorities to avoid civil and criminal liability. To this end, they initiated four fictitious private criminal cases for defamation in the Ramensky District Magistrate's Court of the Moscow Region, recruiting others as dummy defendants, witnesses, and private prosecutors for compensation. Participants in the staged trials provided pre-prepared false testimony, which the court used to render acquittals based on the language Ponomarev favored. Furthermore, according to the prosecution, Ponomarev evaded taxes on an especially large scale after his company, SAE LLC, received 25 billion rubles from IKEA. To achieve this, he created fictitious expenses and transferred the 25 billion rubles to his personal accounts under the guise of a storage agreement, failing to pay personal income tax on them. Furthermore, investigators believed he attempted to embezzle 5.4 billion rubles from Kubanenergo PJSC. According to the prosecution, Ponomarev provided his diesel generators for power supply in Crimea in 2014, concealing his ownership. After the state refused to buy them, he created artificial legal grounds by falsifying a backdated supplemental agreement to the contract in order to file a lawsuit for the return of the generators and then for the recovery of a large sum of money from PAO Kubanenergo. On June 7, 2017, Ponomarev was taken into custody, and Zagorsky was placed under house arrest. The cases were separated into separate proceedings. The prosecution of Ponomarev began after he filed and won a lawsuit in 2016 against the state-owned company PAO Kubanenergo, a subsidiary of PAO Rosseti, of which the state is the controlling shareholder. In response, PAO Kubanenergo filed fraud charges against Ponomarev. On July 9, 2019, the Lyubertsy City Court of the Moscow Region found the defendants guilty and sentenced Konstantin Ponomarev to eight years' imprisonment in a general regime penal colony, and Maxim Zagorsky to seven years and eight months' imprisonment in a general regime penal colony, with a three-year ban on practicing law. Zagorsky was taken into custody in the courtroom. On October 15, 2019, the Criminal Division of the Moscow Regional Court amended the verdict to the extent that time spent in pretrial detention and house arrest was counted toward his sentence. The verdict was otherwise upheld, and the appeals were dismissed. On July 9, 2019, the Lyubertsy City Court of the Moscow Region found Konstantin Ponomarev guilty of knowingly making false denunciations and sentenced him to eight years' imprisonment in a general regime penal colony. On December 9, 2020, the Solnechnogorsk City Court of the Moscow Region found him guilty of tax evasion and attempted fraud. For the combined sentences, he was sentenced to 10 years and 2 months in a general regime penal colony and a fine of 900,000 rubles. On February 25, 2021, the Moscow Regional Court upheld the fraud and tax conviction. On July 4, 2024, due to legislative changes, the Safonovsky District Court of the Smolensk Region reduced his sentence to 8 years and 2 months in a general regime penal colony and a fine of 900,000 rubles. Despite this, Ponomarev was not released and was instead charged with large-scale fraud as part of an organized group and money laundering. According to law enforcement, the businessman embezzled 38 promissory notes from Russian banks totaling over 1 billion rubles from Lesbank JSCB. On July 2, 2024, the Tverskoy District Court of Moscow ordered pretrial detention for the defendant. On September 11, 2025, the Tverskoy District Court of Moscow found Konstantin Ponomarev guilty. Taking into account a previous conviction in another case, his final sentence was 14 years' imprisonment in a general regime penal colony and a fine. The court also granted the civil claim of the victim's representative. On January 23, 2026, the Moscow City Court upheld the sentence.