Lawyer sentenced in Aeroflot fraud
The Swiss federal court has handed a Bern lawyer a suspended sentence of 21 months in prison in connection with defrauding the Russian airline Aeroflot.
The ruling against the 58-year-old man also obliges him to pay SFr90,000 ($87,500) in retribution and over SFr300,000 in court costs.
The verdict was only a partial victory for prosecutors, who had demanded four years in prison and fines of SFr500,000 for the lawyer’s role in the SFr50 million fraud.
The lawyer had been accused of assisting Russian billionaire Boris Berezovsky in siphoning off funds from Aeroflot from foreign transactions via Aeroflot’s Lausanne-based company, Andava, and the financial group, Forus.
In 2003, Swiss prosecutors opened an investigation against the Russian oligarch, who was convicted in absentia in a Russian court in 2006 and sentenced to six years in prison.
Swiss officials on Friday did not disclose the status of the Berezovsky investigation.
In compliance with the JTI standards
More: SWI swissinfo.ch certified by the Journalism Trust Initiative
You can find an overview of ongoing debates with our journalists here . Please join us!
If you want to start a conversation about a topic raised in this article or want to report factual errors, email us at english@swissinfo.ch.