Duma paves way for dissident lawmaker to face fraud charges

When Vladimir Lenin left Russia in 1900, he had a group of like-minded Marxist emigres waiting for him in western Europe and a road map for fomenting revolution back home in St Petersburg.

When Ilya Ponomarev left Moscow for a short trip to California last year, he had only his backpack.

Mr Ponomarev, the only Russian MP to vote against the annexation of Crimea last year, found himself among a growing group of Russian dissidents in exile when a federal bailiff froze his Russian bank cards and barred his return home from a business trip to Silicon Valley.

Russian prosecutors allege that Mr Ponomarev, one of just a handful of opposition lawmakers in the Russian Duma, embezzled Rbs22m ($400,000) from the Skolkovo Foundation, part of a government-sponsored technology project.

On Tuesday, 438 of Mr Ponomarev's 440 fellow MPs voted to strip him of his parliamentary immunity, paving the way for formal criminal proceedings.

In a telephone interview from California ahead of the vote, Mr Ponomarev said he had struggled financially after he found himself stranded in the US last year. "I was on a tourist visa and my credit cards stopped working and there were media reports I couldn't come back," Mr Ponomarev said.

Mr Ponomarev noted that the bailiff's order had come into effect days before he was due to travel with the rest of the Duma to Crimea for an extraordinary address by President Vladimir Putin.

(The speech, which came days before a successful rebel offensive in east Ukraine was never broadcast on state TV and a full transcript was never published on the Kremlin's website.)

In the months since then, Mr Ponomarev, a former technology entrepreneur, has based himself in San Jose, but travels abroad frequently to avoid violating the rules of his US tourist visa. His credit cards still frozen, he has scrabbled together money from speaking engagements and helping companies with research.

"All my accounts in Russia and my salary and assets were taken away," Mr Ponomarev said. "It was a very extreme situation in September and October financially speaking. Now it's more or less stable. It's not very luxurious but at least I can survive."

A former executive for Yukos Oil and Schlumberger, Mr Ponomarev rose to prominence as one of three sitting Duma deputies who helped lead anti-Kremlin street protests in 2011-12. One of those deputies, Gennady Gudkov, faced claims of illegal business activities, like Mr Ponomarev, and was stripped of his seat in August 2012.

Russian prosecutors announced an investigation into Skolkovo - a project started during the investor-friendly presidency of Dmitry Medvedev but which has since stalled - in 2013 with three separate criminal cases of bribery and embezzlement.

Prosecutors allege that Mr Ponomarev took $750,000 in Skolkovo funds without fulfilling the terms of his contract with the organisation. Mr Ponomarev vehemently denies the allegation and has said the Skolkovo case is part of a wider crackdown on the country's liberals.

Despite losing his immunity - and his nearly eight months of exile - Mr Ponomarev is still a sitting member of parliament. As an elected official, he can only be formally ejected from the assembly if Russian prosecutors present a case on his criminal activities to the parliament and call for a separate vote to be held to strip him of his seat.

During Tuesday's parliament session, at least one Duma deputy suggested that Mr Ponomarev should be stripped of his parliamentary immunity for his political stance as well as the Skolkovo allegations.

"He voted against the state's integrity and sovereignty," Alexei Didenko, a member of the far-right LDPR, said referring to Mr Ponomarev's vote against the Crimea annexation last year. "This process [of stripping him of immunity] could have been started at that moment."

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