The former head of Moscow’s Gogol Center theater has been detained by police as part of an ongoing fraud investigation.
Alexei Malobrodsky, who led the Gogol Center between February 2013 and March 2015, was arrested on Monday night.
Malobrodsky was reportedly first summoned as a witness by Moscow’s Investigative Committee as part of an ongoing embezzlement case which saw the theater’s artistic director Kirill Serebrennikov detained in May.
Officials then ruled that the former director had become a formal suspect in the case, an unnamed source told Russia’s Interfax news agency.
In a statement, Investigative Committee officials said that Malobrodsky was part of a scheme to embezzle 200 million rubles ($3.4 million) from Russian nonprofit organization Seventh Studio. Malobrodsky previously worked with the organization as a producer.
The organization's former chief accountant, Nina Maslyaeva, and former director, Yuri Itin, are also facing charges.
