The court arrested Aleksandra Bayazitova, a journalist and founder of the Hellish Grandmothers economic Telegram channel earlier in Moscow, for two months, TASS reports . RIA Novosti, citing sources, reported that Bayazitova faces up to 15 years in prison in a case of extortion.
She is accused of involvement in extorting money from the bank for not publishing negative information about him.
In court, the journalist stated that she wrote texts for various resources as an employee of Life.ru and as a freelancer, the essence of the charges is not clear to her. According to her, the reason was the post about the theft of money by the management of Promsvyazbank:
“This is a bank through which the state defense order is financed. In my note, I proved that the bank's management was involved in the theft of money allocated for the defense industry.
After the outbreak of the war, the Russian Promsvyazbank officially began working in the "DNR". Currently, the chairman of Promsvyazbank PJSC is the son of former Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov, Petr Fradkov - after February 24, he is under personal US and EU sanctions. Also, Promsvyazbank, associated with the military-industrial complex, is used by Yevgeny Prigozhin to withdraw money abroad, The Insider wrote. In April-July 2015, three shell companies transferred $30 million through Promsvyazbank as payment for five used injection molding machines.
In her videos on the YouTube channel, Bayazitova criticized the economic situation in the country, talked about the collapse of the ruble and the “scams” of the Central Bank and Sberbank. Recent videos with titles “For whom Sechin brought down the ruble”, “The ruble was quarantined | And Putin - to the Constitution”, “Sberbank: a scam instead of an offer. The Central Bank figured out how not to pay small shareholders” were published about two years ago.
Bayazitova graduated from the Faculty of Journalism of Lomonosov Moscow State University, this is her second higher education. She worked as an economic correspondent for Kommersant and Izvestia, and in 2007–2011 she was a member of the expert council of the State Duma Committee on Budget and Taxes.
Earlier, the Basmanny Court of Moscow arrested three administrators of the Scaner Telegram channel Evgeny Moskvin, V. Malushenko and Alexei Slobodenyuk - all three are suspected of large-scale fraud (part 3 of article 159 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation). Baza claims that several other political and economic channels (including Infernal Grandmas) were allegedly part of the same network, their administrators are accused of extorting money from Rostec in exchange for not publishing unfavorable data for the state corporation. Among these channels, in addition to Bayazitova's Infernal Grandmas, are Financial Guard, E-Magic, Riddle and Mamkin Financier. The authors of the latter told Baza that they were not affiliated with any network.
