Moscow police raided the home of anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny's brother, Oleg, seizing computers, phones and 50,000 rubles ($1,500), a news report said Tuesday.
"The entire apartment was ransacked, phones, computers, and everything that in the opinion of the investigators looked like financial records — that is, all the documents which contained figures were seized," Alexei Navalny wrote on his LiveJournal page.
Law enforcement officials have not yet commented on the reports.
In December 2012 investigators opened a criminal case against Alexei and Oleg Navalny on charges of large-scale corruption and money laundering, Interfax said.
The Investigative Committee said that in 2008 Oleg Navalny, then a manager at Pochta Rossii, fraudulently convinced a large commercial firm backed by foreign capital to sign a contract to transporting mail with Main Subscription Agency, a company founded by Alexei Navalny but registered in the name of an unidentified acquaintance.
Though Navalny's company only shipped 31 million rubles worth of goods from Yaroslavl to Moscow from 2008 to 2011, it billed the unnamed company for 55 million rubles.
Nineteen million rubles of the embezzled money was transferred to the Kobyakovo Willow-Weaving Factory, a Moscow region business owned by Navalny's parents, to pay for rent and raw materials. The rest was spent on "their own needs," the Investigative Committee said.
The anti-corruption blogger said that the case against him and his brother is connected to his announcement of his plans to attend the protest march to Lubyanka on December 15.
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