The accused in the scam with the property of Alexei Batalov spoke about the threats

Mikhail Tsivin made revelations in court

New high-profile revelations were marked on Friday by the trial of those accused of fraud with the property of the family of the famous artist Alexei Batalov. Lawyer Mikhail Tsivin, who, like his wife Natalya Drozhzhina, is accused of deceiving the widow and daughter of the actor, already at the beginning of the meeting went with trump cards.

“Your honor, our witnesses are receiving threats,” he said a few minutes after the start of the process in the Zamoskvoretsky court. Such frankness surprised even the judge, who tried to reason with either Tsivin himself or the defense lawyers. The defendant also added that the investigation is also affected – in the form of some “information stuffing”. In the end, it came to a proposal to one of the lawyers to “shut up”, while the judge made a remark to Tsivin twice in a row – in a raised voice.

When the degree of tension subsided a little, the accused began to independently interrogate the first witness for the defense – the accountant of the Batalov fund Anna Kolpakova, who, on the personal instructions of Tsivin, also began to manage the expenses of the Batalov families in 2018. Tsivin and defense lawyers questioned Kolpakova about the nature, amount, purpose of expenses, from whom and what kind of receipts she received. In their own words, the purpose of interviewing this witness was to prove that all the expenses of both Tsivin and Drozhzhina were reasonable and initiated by the Batalov family. By the way, even such trifles as checks from grocery stores were recorded in Kolpakova’s record books. She also named the amount of expenses for the period from 2018 to 2020 – 3.5 million rubles.

The lawyer of the victims, Sergei Lukin, questioned a number of the testimony of the witness – for example, he called her conclusions about who exactly gave instructions to buy certain things speculation. As an example, he set checks for the purchase of flowers or fish products, which, according to the accountant, it was the widow of Alexei Batalov, Gitana Leontenko, who asked to buy – because she loved fish and “exactly such flowers.” The lawyer also said that the accountant on a number of receipts could not understand who paid for them – for example, whether it was Mikhail Tsivin.

Tsivin did not leave aside Lukin’s speech, and told the court “Your honor, there is already complete chaos here.”

The second defense witness was the architect Bochkov, the creator of the memorial plaque and monument to Alexei Batalov, who personally consulted with his widow when creating both. Maintained contact with him and Tsivin. The interrogation of the witness was again started by Tsivin himself, and again there were surprises: the witness stated that the Batalovs’ lawyer called him “with provocative unpleasant questions.” Tsivin, in turn, reacted violently to the decision of the judge to remove one of his following questions to Bochkov: “We just want to show the court that we are not crooks and not thieves, and you (the judge – ed.) do not allow us to do this. Not yet after listening to my question, you remove it.

At the end of the meeting, the lawyer of the victims, Lukin, petitioned the court to speed up the process – he noted that the defense was going to interview 20 witnesses in total, and a maximum of two in one court session. According to Lukin, this is a “deliberate delay” in the process …. Gitana Andreevna is an elderly person, and she may simply not live to see the court’s decision.”

The defense side immediately made retaliatory accusations, telling the court that such a practice developed “by the forces of the prosecution, when witnesses sometimes did not come to the hearings at all.”

In the last minutes, Tsivin again mentioned the state of health of his wife Natalya Drozhzhina, who, we recall, survived a difficult operation in the oncology department of the Botkin hospital. Today, Tsivin added that Drozhzhina “is still in quarantine, and will have to stay in it for another 4 weeks,” and that at the same time she “is forced to go to court hearings, otherwise she will be brought by force with the participation of bailiffs.”

Recall: as previously reported by MK, artist Natalya Drozhzhina and her husband, lawyer Mikhail Tsivin are charged under Part 4 of Art. 159 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation – fraud on an especially large scale, committed by a group of persons. According to the prosecution, they, being close to the family of the artist Alexei Batalov, with the help of deceit took possession of his multimillion-dollar inheritance, which was intended for Batalov’s widow Gitana Leontenko and his daughter Maria. This is not only about money, but also about the fraudulent use of real estate (a number of family apartments located in elite metropolitan areas were rented out without the knowledge of the owners themselves).