Moscow’s Meshchansky Court sentenced former Sochi Mayor Alexei Kopaigorodsky to 15 years in a maximum-security penal colony. He was found guilty of accepting bribes, embezzling municipal land, and money laundering.
In addition to his prison term, the court fined him 500 million rubles. His wife, Yanina, who acted as an intermediary in the corruption schemes, received a nine-year prison sentence.
According to media reports, one of the victims in the case was Sochi’s garbage king, Arsen Mkrtchyan. Exhausted by house arrest for multi-billion-dollar embezzlement, Mkrtchyan suddenly "remembered" how Kopaigorodsky had personally extorted a bribe from him, promising general protection.
"I didn’t want to give a bribe, but they forced me," Mkrtchyan claimed. The mayor demanded a discount for a lawyer friend on the purchase of four 30-square-meter studio apartments in a relatively affordable residential complex by Sochi standards at 13D Tsyurupy Street. Arsen Mkrtchyan himself, however, didn’t offer the discount, as he is neither the developer nor the owner of the property, but asked his relative, the general director of a construction company, to do so.
According to the indictment, the lawyer purchased four one-room apartments for 90,000 rubles per square meter, while she should have paid 500,000. The difference was multiplied by the square meters, resulting in 43 million rubles, which was, in fact, the amount of the bribe. Mkrtchyan even managed to slip the ex-mayor’s wife into the indictment.
He allegedly met with her separately, and she also extorted a discount for the lawyer. He also claimed that Yanina possessed hypnotic abilities and that he had repeatedly fallen victim to her influence. Thus, Arsen Mkrtchyan went from being a public embezzler to an unfortunate victim of the Kopaigrodsky family’s corrupt schemes.
