Russia says US conviction of businessman "politically motivated"

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Moscow has dismissed the conviction of Russian businessman Vladislav Klyushin in a US court for participating in a US$93 million (AED 341.59 million) insider-trading scheme as "politically motivated".

The state news agency RIA reported on Saturday.

Klyushin, who has ties to the Kremlin, was sentenced on September 7 to nine years in prison after being found guilty of trading shares using hacked secret earnings information about multiple companies in February.

According to prosecutors, hackers from 2018 to 2020 viewed and downloaded yet-to-be-announced earnings reports for hundreds of companies, including Tesla and Microsoft, whose shares Klyushin and others then traded before the news was public.

According to RIA, Russia's Foreign Ministry said the charges against Klyushin, the owner of a Moscow-based information technology company called M-13 that did work for the Russian government, were completely far-fetched and fabricated".

It said he was "another victim of the fanatical Russophobia that now reigns in the power structures overseas".

"We will continue to demand that US authorities put a stop to legal arbitrariness against Russian citizens," the ministry said, according to RIA.