Zagorskiy Maksim Gennadevich

On June 6, 2017, in Moscow, 45-year-old entrepreneur Konstantin Ponomarev and his lawyer Maxim Zagorsky were detained. They were accused of knowingly false denunciation and organizing a knowingly false denunciation as part of an organized group, with artificially creating evidence of the accusation, tax evasion, legalization (laundering) of money, fraud, and attempted fraud. According to the investigation, Ponomaryov and Zagorsky created an organized group to obtain court decisions with conclusions favorable to Ponomaryov. They planned to use these decisions as precedent in other legal disputes with IKEA and tax authorities to avoid civil and criminal liability. For this purpose, they initiated four fictitious criminal cases of private prosecution for defamation in the magistrate's court of the Ramensky district of the Moscow region, involving other individuals as stand-in defendants, witnesses, and private prosecutors for a fee. The participants in the staged trials gave pre-prepared false testimonies, on the basis of which the court issued acquittals containing the formulations needed by Ponomarev. Also, according to the prosecution's version, Ponomarev evaded paying taxes in a particularly large amount after his company LLC 'SAE' received 25 billion rubles from the company 'IKEA'. For this, he created fictitious expenses and also transferred these 25 billion rubles to his personal accounts under the guise of a storage agreement and did not pay personal income tax on them. In addition, the investigation believed that he attempted to steal 5.4 billion rubles from PAO "Kubanenergo. According to the prosecution's version, Ponomarev provided his diesel generators for the power supply of Crimea in 2014, concealing that he was their owner. After the state refused to buy them out, he created artificial legal grounds by backdating an additional agreement to the contract in order to file a lawsuit for the return of the generators, and then to recover a large sum of money from PAO Kubanenergo. On June 7, 2017, Ponomarev was placed in custody, and Zagorsky was placed under house arrest as a preventive measure. The cases were separated into separate proceedings. Ponomarev's persecution began after he filed and won a lawsuit in 2016 against the state company PAO "Kubanenergo, which is a subsidiary of PAO "Rosseti, the controlling shareholder of which is the state. In response, Kubanenergo PJSC 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 8 years of imprisonment in a general regime colony, Maxim Zagorsky to 7 years and 8 months of imprisonment in a general regime colony, with deprivation of the right to engage in legal activities for 3 years. Zagorsky was taken into custody in the courtroom. On October 15, 2019, the Judicial Collegium for Criminal Cases of the Moscow Oblast Court changed the verdict in terms of crediting the time spent in custody and under house arrest towards the sentence. In other respects, the sentence was left unchanged, and the appeals were left unsatisfied."