Ex-official of the Ministry of Culture Borys Mazo was sentenced to 8.5 years in prison

The court in St. Petersburg announced the sentence to the former director of the property management department of the Ministry of Culture, Boris Mazo, who was accused of embezzling budget funds allocated for the construction of the Hermitage buildings.

As stated in the Telegram channel of the joint press service of the St. Petersburg courts, the court sentenced Mazo to imprisonment for 8 years with a fine of 500,000 rubles. According to the totality of the sentences, he will spend 8.5 years in a general regime colony with a fine of 600,000 rubles.

Mazo pleaded not guilty and previously compensated the damage in the amount of 500 thousand rubles.

The former official was accused of fraud as part of an organized group in the amount of 450 million rubles during the construction of the Hermitage complex. The former Deputy Minister of Culture Hryhoriy Pyrumov was on trial for the same case.

In 2017, the court sentenced Mazo and Pyrumov to imprisonment in the so-called restorers’ case – the embezzlement of more than 160 million rubles during the conclusion of contracts for the restoration of cultural objects. Mazo was then released from custody, as he had served the appointed term in a pre-trial detention center. After that, he went abroad, but in the summer of 2018 he was declared wanted in a new case related to the construction of buildings for the Hermitage.

A criminal case against Mazo was also initiated in Spain – there he was suspected of money laundering, in particular, in the purchase of a mansion in the resort city of Marbella for 4 million euros with funds that could have been obtained illegally.

In 2019, Mazo was detained in Austria, from where he was extradited to Russia.