Navalny Faces Investigation

The Russian government thinks that it’s just deplorable that Julian Assange is under arrest and charged with a crime, yet doesn’t blink to open a probe against the anti-corruption crusader Alexei Navalny.  Come to think of it, the list of persecuted whistleblowers in Russia is growing quite long.  However, much like Assange’s WikiLeaks, it seems unlikely that Navalny’s new project Rospil.info would all of a sudden stop because they are going after the founder.  From the Financial Times:

The Russian state prosecutor’s office said it was examining whether Mr Navalny had caused more than Rbs1m ($32,000) worth of damage to Kirovles, a timber company in the Kirov region near the Ural mountains.

Mr Navalny, who was hired by the governor of Kirov in 2008 to fight corruption in the region, fell out with Kirovles when he ordered the company to trade timber more transparently. The director of Kirovles at the time was fired. (…)

Alexei Mukhin, the director of the Centre for Political Information, a Moscow-based think-tank, said the authorities would lose patience with Mr Navalny’s blogs.

“At first they did not know what to do with him – they just hoped he would disappear,” he said. “There is now a risk that he will end up sitting in the Lubyanka [the security services’ headquarters] for a long time.”