Lithuania granted provisional asylum to Igor Babenko, 55, a former manager of embattled oil company Yukos' Menatep St. Petersburg bank affiliate in Southern Russia, last October, and the country's Supreme Administrative Court upheld Monday political asylum for Babenko.
"The decision to grant asylum to the Russian citizen [Babenko] was justified," the court said on its Web site.
In Russia, Babenko, who was born in Lithuania, is accused of issuing loans worth 119 million rubles ($4.42 million) to two companies in league with their executives, who allegedly pocketed the money. Russian investigators estimated the value of other schemes involving the banker at 214 million rubles (about $8 million).
Babenko has dismissed the charges against him as political. His lawyer said earlier the banker is being prosecuted only because he headed an affiliate of the bank connected with imprisoned Yukos founder Mikhail Khodorkovsky's inner circle.
But the Trust bank, formerly known as Menatep St. Petersburg, said the case is not politically motivated. Yekaterina Tolkunova, the bank's marketing director, said earlier the case is "a felony, pure and simple."
An in-house probe into the missing loans has revealed that controversial local businessmen were behind the firms that received them, Tolkunova said.
Lithuanian authorities arrested Babenko in July 2005 after a Russian court issued an arrest warrant and put the banker and his associates on an international wanted list.
In September, a Vilnius district court ruled to extradite Babenko to Russia, saying Russian authorities had provided convincing evidence. But an appeals court in the Baltic state put the extradition order on hold pending an asylum ruling.
