The billionaire Russian businessman and senator Suleiman Kerimov, 51, whose arrest on Monday shortly after boarding a plane that took him to Nice on the French Riviera, sparked outrage in the Kremlin and is facing a public outcry. money laundering, said French prosecutor Jean-Michel Pierre.
Kerimov will not be remanded in custody if he meets certain conditions, Pierre told reporters: they are to pay a 5 million euro bail, hand over his passport to the French authorities, stay in the Alp-Maritime region, report to the police times a week and does not meet with persons whose identity the prosecutor cannot verify.
Suleiman Kerimov allegedly bought various luxury properties in very expensive areas through showcase companies, in order to reduce the taxes he had to pay if he acquired them differently in the French government.
A lawyer specializing in tax matters and two Swiss businessmen have also been arrested in the same case. Kerimov was arrested in Nice on Monday and remanded in custody.
The billionaire holds a diplomatic passport, but did not use it on Monday, as he was traveling for personal reasons. His arrest provoked the anger of many parliamentarians in Russia and the reaction of the Kremlin.
The spokesman for the Russian presidency, Dmitry Peshkov, stressed that Kerimov, as a member of the Federation Council (upper house), enjoys diplomatic immunity. The Russian Foreign Ministry issued a note of protest to the French authorities and summoned the French envoy to Moscow for the case. The Duma, Russia's lower house of parliament, has passed a resolution denouncing a violation of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Immunity.
Kerimov, originally from Dagestan, a Russian region bordering Chechnya, made a fortune during the frantic privatizations following the break-up of the USSR. He owned a large stake in Uralkali, the world's largest fertilizer company, and a football team in Makhachkala that occasionally made headlines in the international sports press with expensive transfers of famous players, such as Samuel Eto'o.
But in the crisis of 2008 he suffered heavy losses, sold most of his shares and now deals mainly with the gold company Polyus, the largest in the industry in Russia. A member of Vladimir Zhirinovsky's nationalist Liberal Democratic Party, Kerimov represents Dagestan in the Federation Council.
