Director Kirill Serebrennikov, a figure in the Russian artistic community, was convicted of fraud on Friday June 26 by a Moscow court in a controversial case.

"Serebrennikov (his co-defendants), Itine, Malobrodski committed fraud [...] of a particularly significant scale", according to the judgment read by the judge, without immediately announcing the sentences imposed.

Almost 128 million rubles

At 50, the director and director is accused of having embezzled between 2011 and 2014 about 128 million rubles from public subsidies. Arrested in August 2017, he had been under house arrest until April 2019.

In September 2019, the Russian justice system had lifted "all preventive measures" against him and his three accused collaborators, then returned the file to the Prosecutor's Office, considering it incomplete.

A third appraisal finally indicated at the beginning of June that the director and his team had received an overpayment of 128 million rubles in public aid for a project of the troupe "Seventh studio" of Kirill Serebrennikov. This takes the opposite view from a previous expertise which had undermined the accusation.

A petition launched by 3,000 personalities

Kirill Serebrennikov, who is the artistic director of the Gogol Center, a famous Moscow theater, has always denied the charges against him.

For his supporters, he pays for his freedom of creation and his sometimes daring plays, mixing politics, sexuality and religion, in a country where the authorities are pushing for a resurgence of "traditional values". The authorities deny this interpretation of the facts.

Since his arrest, numerous appeals for him have been launched by personalities from the world of the arts in Russia and abroad.

Some 3,000 cultural figures had called on Monday in a petition, the Ministry of Culture to drop the charges. They denounce a "case which has been fabricated" by the investigators.

Under house arrest for three years

Kirill Serebrennikov was noticed for his film "Leto", on the life of the Soviet rocker Viktor Tsoï, whose editing he had finished during his house arrest. The film was awarded in 2018 at the Cannes festival.

Because of this measure, he also missed the Moscow Bolshoi premiere of his ballet "Nureyev" at the end of 2017, dedicated to the star dancer who passed to the West in 1961. The show was caught in controversy, delaying the premiere of six months.

With AFP

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