Moscow City Court spokeswoman Anna Usachyova said Friday that a preliminary hearing in the case against Dmitry Dovgy, the former head of the committee's main investigative directorate, would start behind closed doors Monday. Dovgy is accused of abuse of office and bribery.
Analysts said the fact that the trial will be held shows that the battle for influence between competing groups close to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is ongoing. "I do not see that the main parameters [of the power struggle] have changed," said Andrei Soldatov, editor of the Agentura.ru web site and an expert on Russian security services.
Dovgy was dismissed last April and arrested three months later on charges of accepting a bribe of 750,000 euros ($970,000) from a "well-known businessman" in exchange for halting an investigation into his company, investigators have said. He has denied the charges and said they were an act of revenge by former colleagues. If convicted, he faces up to 12 years in prison.
Dovgy oversaw investigations into Deputy Finance Minister Sergei Storchak, senior Federal Drug Control Service officer Alexander Bulbov and Vladimir Barsukov, a reputed crime boss from St. Petersburg.
In a newspaper interview last May, Dovgy accused his former boss, Investigative Committee head Alexander Bastrykin, of ordering him to open the investigations into Storchak and Bulbov, whom he said were innocent.
Storchak was arrested on attempted embezzlement charges in November 2007 and freed last fall pending trial. Bulbov, who was arrested in October 2007 on charges of abuse of office and illegal wiretapping, remains in custody after the Moscow City Court last November rejected a request by the Prosecutor General's Office to release him.
The cases against Storchak, Bulbov and Barsukov have been called victories for a group of hardliners, including Bastrykin, close to Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin. The rival group, centered around former Federal Drug Control Service head Viktor Cherkesov, includes Prosecutor General Yury Chaika.
Since its creation in 2007, Bastrykin's Investigative Committee has accumulated the powers to open and conduct investigations, and it has routinely refused to carry out orders from the prosecutor general. In February, the Supreme Court ruled that the Prosecutor General's Office has ultimate authority over the Investigative Committee.
Stanislav Belkovsky, head of the National Strategy Institute, said the power struggle would only end if President Dmitry Medvedev combined the competing law enforcement agencies into a single investigative body.
Belkovsky said the outcome of Dovgy's trial was difficult to guess, given what he called political influence on the courts.
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