The Prosecutor General's Office filed an administrative lawsuit in the Soviet District Court of Chelyabinsk to recognize the 'extremist' association 'Makhonins', led by businessmen Alexander and Andrey Makhonins, and to transfer the group's assets worth 2.5 billion rubles to the state, reports 'Kommersant'.
The defendants in the lawsuit are named as 16 individuals, relatives, and acquaintances of Makhonin, as well as seven firms. As stated in the lawsuit, the prosecutor's office, together with the regional department of the FSB of Russia, identified the association 'Makhonins'. Its activities are based on common ideological and property interests, and its participants adhere to the views and ideas of the internationally recognized extremist and banned in Russia public movement 'Prison Criminal Unity' (AUE).
According to the prosecutor's office, the association has been functioning since the 1990s, it was created and is managed by brothers Andrey and Alexander Makhonins, who 'used their criminal experience and the criminal past of its active participants to create it'.
Since its inception, as the prosecutor's office claims, the 'Makhonins' have been engaged in 'extortion, robbery, banditry, forceful redistribution of economic spheres of influence, intimidation of residents of the Chelyabinsk region, their competitors, and opponents'. At the same time, the lawsuit lists crimes over the past 30 years. The Prosecutor General's Office associates the lack of accountability for the Makhonin brothers with their informal relationships with the authorities and law enforcement agencies.
Rosfinmonitoring established that the income from the commercial use of illegally acquired property is being transferred abroad by the association.