Prokhorov's Girls Win Suit against Police
A French court has ruled in favor of five Russian women detained by police with oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov in Courchevel in January 2007. The court has ordered the police to return money, furs and other valuables seized from the young women. Two more of the women are suing the police for illegal arrest. Prokhorov, the former head of Norilsk Nickel, was taken into custody with 16 young women in the French ski resort. They were held in Lyons on suspicion of involvement in a prostitution ring. The girls were released without being charged, but Prokhorov was held for four days. His lawyer, Alexander Genko-Staroselsky, states that Prokhorov is still under investigation.
Seven of the 16 girls involved have filed suit in Lyon against the French police. Five of them sued after an investigator refused to return possessions seized at the time of their arrest. The suit was initially rejected by the court, but an appellate court agreed to hear it.
The lawyer for the young women, Soren Margulis, said that the arrest of the young women was illegal because there were no grounds for it. “The girls were accused of prostitution, but they had done nothing to tie them to such activities,” Margulis explained. “They interrogated them for two hours, revealing that they were not prostitutes and they received a negative answer to that. Under French law, engaging in prostitution is not a crime, so the suspicion cannot even serve as grounds for arrest.” Margulis pointed out that his clients come from good families. They are the daughters of doctors and policemen and all of them have higher educations or are now students. One of them is a biologist and another a lawyer. “They want to restore their reputations,” Margulis noted.
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All the Article in Russian as of Apr. 29, 2008
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