Moscow City Court dismissed the appeal by Igor Reshetin’s lawyers. The scholar is waiting to be passed to the maximum security colony where he will spend 11.5 years in accordance with the sentence. His colleague Sergei Vizbor is sentenced for 11 years of maximum security colony. Other colleagues – Mikhail Ivanov and Alexander Rozhkin – got 5 years each in the standard security colony.

Reminding, the General Director of TsNIIMASh-Export, academician, a well-known scholar Igor Reshetin and his colleagues were accused of illegal passing the double-purposed technology to China, also of smuggling, money laundering and embezzlement.

The investigation lasted four years. Since 2005 Igor Reshetin has been kept in the custody. The accusations were grounded on the two contracts signed in 1996 in accordance with which the Reshetin’s organization made calculations of the characteristics of the returnable space modules. The scientists were charged with selling the technologies banned for spread. To make the charges weightier, the accusations of economic crimes were added. 

Either interference by the largest scholars headed by the academician Yuri Ryzhov, or expert opinions saying there had been no passing of technologies, or lawyers’ complaints about distortion of the testimony by witnesses – all that did not help.   

The sentence was delivered 3 December last year. Now the Moscow City court has left it unchanged. According to the lawyer Anatoly Yablokov, one and a half month before the final sentence was announced Igor Reshetin was moved to the cell where other inmates wait for being transported to the penal colony. During the court proceedings all the petitions by the accused and by the lawyers were declined and so reading the sentence was just a formality.

“We tried to prove not the lack of evidence for guilty-sentence, but the absence of any crime in the act” explained Anatoly Yablokov. “But the court did not even notice gross procedural violations”.   

Within next 10 days the scholars are to be sent to the penal colony. The lawyers only may make a supervisory complaint to the Moscow City Court and apply to the Strasburg-located European Court for Human Rights.