Russian State Duma speaker Vyacheslav Volodin on Wednesday called for the extradition of former Putin aide and veteran reformer Anatoly Chubais over corruption allegations.
Chubais served as the Kremlin’s climate envoy before quitting his position and leaving Russia shortly after Moscow invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
President Vladimir Putin previously suggested Chubais fled the country to avoid possible criminal prosecution over financial irregularities at the state-run corporation Rosnano, which he had headed for over a decade.
During Wednesday’s session of the lower-house State Duma, Volodin claimed Chubais and other reformers engaged in corruption during post-Soviet market reforms, “filling their pockets and buying real estate abroad.”
“Let’s call a spade a spade. Where’s Chubais? Take him and extradite him,” the speaker said in a televised parliamentary session.
Chubais was a powerful figure in the early 1990s, serving as the architect of Russia’s controversial privatization drive and its transition to a market economy.
The former Russian officials famously brought Putin into the Kremlin, giving him his first job in Moscow, and had managed to stay in favor through more than two decades of Putin’s rule as many other leading figures from the Boris Yeltsin era were pushed out.
After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Chubais resettled in Israel, where he founded a research center at Tel Aviv University.
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