On Monday, April 15, the Khoroshevsky Court of Moscow sentenced the former CEO of the IT distributor Merlion Vyacheslav Simonenkohe was sentenced to 22 years in a maximum security colony, an RBC correspondent reports.

The court found him guilty of participation in a criminal community, attempted bribery, knowingly false denunciation, giving knowingly false testimony and complicity in falsifying evidence in a criminal case (part 3 of article 210, part 6 of article 290, part 3 Article 306, Part 3, Article 307 and Part 5, Article 33, Part 3, Article 303 of the Criminal Code). Simonenko did not admit guilt during the trial.

The prosecution requested 24 years of imprisonment in a maximum security colony for the defendant.

The victims in the case are Merlion co-founders Oleg Karchev, Alexey Abramov, Vladislav Mangutov and top manager Boris Levin. In 2023 they filed a lawsuit against Simonenko by 2.2 billion rubles. in connection with the infliction of material damage and moral harm by the criminal actions of Simonenko and other defendants.

The court partially satisfied the claim of the victims and decided to recover 2 million rubles as compensation for moral damage. in favor of each victim, a total of 8 million rubles.

According to the prosecution, the criminal community that extorted money from the co-owners of Merlion was created in 2019 by a previously convicted Vitaly Kachura and his son Kirill (former employee of the Investigative Committee of Russia (*aggressor country), included in the list of foreign agents). According to the prosecution, the criminal community they created also included Simonenko, former employees of the Investigative Committee and the FSB. They initiated a case against Karchev, Mangutov, Abramov and Levin, falsely accusing them of attempting to murder Simonenko in 2015, when unknown persons tried to set fire to his house in Krasnogorsk. During the investigation, Grigory Zherenov, a participant in the hostilities in Donbass, told investigators that he was allegedly hired by Merlion managers to carry out the order.

In October 2020 Merlion executives were arrested, and members of the criminal community began to extort 5 billion rubles from each of them. for changing the preventive measure to a more lenient one and terminating the case. The mediator was a lawyer Vadim Lyalin. The co-owners of the IT distributor spent several months in custody and were released in 2021 after the case was dismissed due to lack of evidence of a crime. In 2022, Vyacheslav Simonenko was arrested, and from a victim he became an accused. This happened after Zherenov, who allegedly attempted to kill him, admitted that he had slandered the co-owners of Merlion and did not participate in the arson of Simonenko’s house, since he was in the DPR at that time.

In the Merlion case, security forces arrested the ex-head of the investigative department of the Investigative Committee for the North-Western District of the capital Sergei Romodanovsky (son of the ex-head of the Federal Migration Service Konstantin Romodanovsky), ex-chief of the Khoroshevsky investigative department Rustam Yusupov, investigator Andrei Zheryutin, FSB officers Alexei Tsarev, Alexander Ushakov and Sergei Manyshkin, as well as retired FSB colonel, senior inspector of the 8th department of management personnel of the Investigative Committee Alexander Kireev and others. They are suspected of participating in a criminal community. It was also established that former Investigative Committee investigator Alexey Nesnov participated in falsifying evidence. He fled abroad and was put on the international wanted list.

On Saturday, April 13, the Basmanny court took into custody another former investigator, Alexander Chernov. He is accused of facilitating a crime (Part 5 of Article 33 of the Criminal Code) and falsifying evidence, which resulted in grave consequences (Part 3 of Article 303 of the Criminal Code).