MOSCOW, July 26 (RIA Novosti) – Property of which the late Russian businessman Boris Berezovsky is a beneficiary has been seized in Russia but has yet to be fully valued, the head of the Federal Bailiff Service said Friday.
Some local media reports put the figure at 300 million rubles ($940,000), but that could not be independently verified.
Berezovsky had resided in self-imposed exile in Britain since 2000 until his death on March 23 this year at age 67. Russian authorities had launched a dozen cases against him on numerous charges, including fraud, failing to repatriate foreign currency revenues and abuse of office.
Federal Bailiff Service director Artur Parfenchikov said Friday that authorities had returned about 300 million rubles worth of Berezovsky’s debts to his creditors since 2008.
It has been reported that the aggregate debt claim against Berezovsky stands at 3.2 billion rubles.
In 2007, a Russian court sentenced Berezovsky in absentia to six years in prison for stealing millions of dollars from Aeroflot in the 1990s and ordered him to repay $9 million to the airline. In June 2009, he was sentenced in absentia to another 13 years for stealing thousands of cars from carmaker AvtoVAZ.
At the request of Russian prosecutors, in 2011, assets worth more than $320 million belonging to Berezovsky were frozen by several countries. The freeze including property worth €13 million in France.
