Any system is defined by how it responds to mistakes.

Forwarded From Defiant Lawyer

Any system is defined by how it responds to mistakes.

In Stavropol, during the criminal prosecution of Liliya Sklyarova, property worth about 300 million was taken out from under arrest and disappeared "without a trace." The post above contains the details of the case itself.

At the same time, what matters is not only the property issue, but also the fact that recording and assessing the existence of these unfinished construction projects during the criminal proceedings should have led to the defendant's acquittal.

She was accused of deceiving shared-equity investors and stealing their money, whereas it turned out that real estate assets worth 300 million (two thirds of the money raised) had been built. Those are exactly the assets that disappeared.

Moreover, many questions should also have arisen about what caused construction to stop. Wasn't it the criminal case itself?

But the lifting of the seizure and the criminal case itself are only half the trouble.

The questions here are for the investigators and the prosecutor's office, which canceled the seizure of the properties in the criminal case by transferring them into the developer's bankruptcy case. If the properties were transferred, then why was the criminal case not terminated immediately? After all, that would mean the developer was conducting real activity and had assets.

But that is not even the crux of it.

The crux is that the judge who considered the criminal case on the merits concealed the fact that this property had been alienated, did not assess its significance as a circumstance justifying the defendant in the verdict, and did not reduce the total amount of damages.

And crucially: in the verdict she found it necessary to keep the seizure on the unfinished construction projects in place to compensate the victims for their harm. Even though the properties had long since been sold.

Liliya herself, in the absence of normal defense and support, for a long time did not understand the essence of what was happening.

Last year we raised a federal-level uproar over the outrages described here.

So what started happening? The judge who handed down the verdict began declaring that the decision to preserve the seizure in the verdict was a typo! Entire paragraphs from the reasoning and operative parts!!!

She issued a judicial ruling to that effect.

The absurdity is that even if you treat the false conclusion in the verdict as a typo, that does not solve the problem in any way and in fact makes it worse, because it confirms the arguments about the unlawful alienation of the property.

The verdict needs to be overturned, at a minimum.

And a criminal case needs to be opened against everyone involved in the unlawful interference in the construction project, the unlawful persecution of an innocent person, and the alienation of her property.

But Sklyarova's only objective is to have the verdict overturned and half of the imputed amount removed from the charges.

These are the steps that the regional prosecutor's office should take, and without any consequences for itself: file a submission to the cassation court, correct the verdict, and that's it.

Instead, there has been this messing around with typos, as if that will resolve the situation. No.

Moreover, last week the appeal court overturned the judge's ruling about the typo: a regional court judge recognized that the judge changed the verdict rather than corrected a typo. There is no typo there.

But that is not even the vilest part.

One might assume that in one particular region there is outrageous mutual cover-up and incompetence.

But what is far worse is when it is almost impossible to get a proper response from the federal authorities.

I have already written about the nonsense the Prosecutor General's Office sent in response to Sklyarova's statements.

And yet the situation here is completely out of the ordinary.

One must conclude that the situation with federal oversight of the criminal justice sphere is simply catastrophic. The problem has always existed, but for it to be this total. This is a new level. One can say that any mechanisms for protecting the individual from arbitrariness have been destroyed.

By the way, we are deliberately not using the last judicial instance yet. We need to get the verdict overturned either through prosecutorial initiative or through a criminal case.

Only now have some movements finally begun in the Investigative Committee and the FSB. But all this came only after repeated appeals to the federal authorities.

Read the statement in the post below.

Everything is laid out there clearly and plainly. What officials from different agencies did together.

This also, by the way, touches on the topical issue of lifting a seizure in a criminal case for the sake of a bankruptcy case. The way it is done here must not be done.

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To the post above