MOSCOW: A Moscow court has toughened an embezzlement conviction against a French banker who left the country years earlier, converting his initial suspended sentence to jail time, Russian state media reported Wednesday.
\nPhilippe Delpal, a former senior executive at the Baring Vostok investment group, received a four-and-a-half year suspended sentence in 2021 for allegedly swindling funds from Vostochny Bank \u2014 partly owned at the time by a businessman linked to Vladimir Putin.
\nDelpal was sentenced alongside his business partner, US investor Michael Calvey, both of whom vehemently denied the charges.
\nThe case shocked Russia\u2019s business community and triggered an outflow of foreign capital from Russia.
\nThe latest move, while likely to have little impact, comes as relations between Moscow and Paris plummet to new lows as the Kremlin shifts blame for the three-year Ukraine conflict from the United States to Europe.
\nBoth Calvey and Delpal left Russia once the travel restrictions in their suspended sentences were lifted.
\nMoscow\u2019s Tverskoy Court on Wednesday replaced Delpal\u2019s initial suspended sentence \u201cwith a real one\u201d following a petition from Russia\u2019s federal prison service, Russia\u2019s state TASS news agency reported.
\nDelpal, who spent six months in jail before he was put under house arrest, received the suspended sentence in 2021.
\nFive Russian associates who said they were innocent also received suspended sentences of between three-and-a-half years to five years.
\nA Moscow court later reduced Delpal\u2019s sentence from four-and-a-half years to three-and-a-half-years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
MOSCOW: A Moscow court has toughened an embezzlement conviction against a French banker who left the country years earlier, converting his initial suspended sentence to jail time, Russian state media reported Wednesday. Philippe Delpal, a former senior executive at the Baring Vostok investment group, received a four-and-a-half year suspended sentence in 2021 for allegedly swindling …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":78664,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-78654","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78654","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78654"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78654\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":78667,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78654\/revisions\/78667"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/78664"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78654"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78654"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78654"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}