MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russian prosecutors have filed a lawsuit seeking to recover assets from former Gazprom manager Kirill Seleznyov, a court spokeswoman said on Friday.
Interfax news agency said Seleznyov and two other defendants were suspected of diverting at least 150 billion roubles ($1.7 billion) from a Gazprom company.
Darya Lebedeva, spokeswoman for the Frunzensky court in St.
Petersburg, posted on Telegram that the court had registered the lawsuit, but she did not specify the amount.
Seleznyov is a long-standing ally of Gazprom’s Chief Executive Officer Alexei Miller and served on the company’s management board for 15 years.
He is now head of RusChemAlliance, a company half-owned by Gazprom. RusChemAlliance declined to comment when approached by Reuters.
The RBC business news outlet cited Lebedeva as saying the authorities were seeking the return of shares and stakes in some companies that they believed the defendants had acquired “in a corrupt way”.
RusChemAlliance is itself embroiled in litigation with several Western companies over a large-scale gas project on the Baltic Sea.
Seleznyov took up his job there after leaving Gazprom in 2019.
($1 = 88.9000 roubles)
(Reporting by Vladimir Soldatkin and Oksana Kobzeva; Editing by Tomasz Janowski)
