Moscow's district court sentenced Alexander Tugushev, a former deputy head of the State Fisheries Committee, February 15 to six years in prison on charges of extorting $3.7 million for illegal fishing quotas in 2003 from a fishing company based in the Pacific port of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky.
The other three defendants, who have also been in custody since August 2005 on suspicion of acting as middlemen in the scheme, were sentenced to five and half years in prison.
The court also ruled the convicted men pay $3.63 million to the company at the center of the scandal.
Investigators said the defendants had promised the fishing company a quota of at least 50,000 metric tons of bio resources a year in 2004-2008 for $3.7 million.
