MOSCOW, July 5 (RAPSI) – A Russian regional court has sentenced a US citizen and his partner in crime to seven-year jail terms for extorting an inheritance worth $4.35 million from a widow.
US citizen Gennady Yelchev and Ramzan Vagapov, the founder of the Kavkaz stabilization fund, extorted money from the widow of a businessman after she inherited bank accounts and property in Russia and abroad from her late husband, the Bashkortostan republic’s Federal Security Service (FSB) said.
An ethnic Chechen, Vagapov set up his fund in Chechnya in 2007 to protect human rights activists, according to its website.
"Yelchev called her in February 2012 and introduced himself as the director of the Moscow office of a US company and an advisor to the first deputy prime minister of Chechnya,” the FSB said in a statement.
“He said that a $3 million loan that her late husband had taken from this company at 10 percent interest had matured in 2010, with the total amount owed, including interest totaling $4.5 million as of December 2010."
Yelchev said the debt has been sold to Chechnya, and demanded the return of the money, threatening the woman with violence if she failed to pay up.
Yelchev and Vagapov were arrested while accepting the money. Yelchev was carrying ID identifying him an advisor to the first deputy prime minister of Chechnya, while Vagapov's ID said he was an assistant of a Federation Council member. The security service did not say whether the ID documents were forged.
