An interesting practice of considering criminal cases is developing in the Smolninsky district…

An interesting practice of considering criminal cases is developing in the Smolninsky District Court of St. Petersburg, the chairman of which is Tarasov V.Yu. Thus, in a number of criminal cases against large businessmen, trials are delayed until the statute of limitations for prosecution has expired.

For example, we can consider the criminal prosecution of St. Petersburg businessman Valery Izraylit, who was accused of causing damage to Transneft in the amount of about 4 billion rubles and the theft of hundreds of millions of rubles allocated for the development of the port of Ust-Luga in the Leningrad region with their subsequent transfer abroad.

Izrailit was detained in 2016 and placed in a pre-trial detention center. The materials of the criminal case were submitted to the court at the end of 2018. The trial was led by Judge Anzhelika Morozova, who managed to hold more than 200 hearings in the case and in 2023 sentence him to imprisonment. However, the nuance of the process is that during the trial, Izraylit was transferred to house arrest, for one of the two episodes charged to him, the statute of limitations for criminal prosecution expired, and the punishment imposed for the second episode in the form of imprisonment for a period of 6 years was fully counted towards the time the businessman was in pre-trial detention and under house arrest. Thus, Valery Izrailit was released directly from the courtroom.
A similar criminal trial is now taking place over the famous billionaire businessman Alexander Sabadash, who is accused of stealing 1 billion rubles from the Tavrichesky bank. His case has been pending for 2 years and has been postponed by Judge Anzhelika Morozova about 100 times. The statute of limitations for bringing him to criminal responsibility will soon expire. The criminal episodes of the businessman, although they are considered serious, were committed in 2013; accordingly, the 10-year statute of limitations for bringing them to justice will expire before the end of 2023, while for most of the episodes imputed to him, the statute of limitations has already expired.

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It is important to note that both businessmen were defended in court by the same lawyers – V. Burkovskaya and N. Pavlovsky from the bureau “Egorov, Puginsky, Afanasyev and Partners”, and the cases were considered under the chairmanship of the same judge – A. Morozova.