The Moscow City Court changed the measure of restraint from detention to a ban on certain actions for the ex-deputy minister of education and former vice-president of Sberbank Marina Rakova, and the rector Shaninka Sergey Zuev was released from house arrest. They are accused of fraud on an especially large scale – embezzlement of funds allocated from the budget for the development of education. This is reported by Interfax and TASS .
Thus, by November 3, all defendants in the case of embezzlement of more than 50 million rubles from the Moscow Higher School of Social and Economic Sciences (Shaninka) were released from the pre-trial detention center.
Now Rakova and Zuev are forbidden to visit Shaninka, RANEPA and Sberbank. The prohibition of certain actions was also assigned to other defendants in the case: Maxim Inkin, Yevgeny Zak, Artur Stetsenko and Kristina Kryuchkova.
In August, Rakova was the last to confess, before that all the other defendants in the case pleaded guilty. The day before Rakov’s confession, Shaninka Zuev, rector, “admitted guilt in a particularly large-scale fraud” and compensated for the damage of about 15 million rubles, after which he was released from the pre-trial detention center under house arrest. The investigator claimed that Zuev gave "damaging testimony" against other defendants in the case and accomplices, about whom the investigation was not previously aware.
Before that, the rector of the RANEPA Vladimir Mau, whose case is connected with the cases of Rakova and Zuev, was replaced with a measure of restraint from house arrest to a written undertaking not to leave. However, this did not prevent Mau from returning to work at the academy in the same status. Mau's prosecution was dropped in October 2022. His lawyer Aleksey Dudnik stated that the case was closed "due to the client's non-involvement in the commission of the alleged crime."
According to The Insider columnist Boris Grozovsky, the arrest of the rector of the RANEPA showed that even a mild opposition to the Kremlin is now unacceptable.
