Russia: nearly four million roubles of jewellery taken from an acquaintance for a 'cleansing' of family problems

Proceedings

1. 2019-09-10 · conviction and sentence at first instance

   Gatchina City Court, Leningrad Oblast, Russia (Гатчинский городской суд Ленинградской области). The defendant, anonymised in the published judgment as ФИО1, was convicted of fraud on an especially large scale by deception and abuse of trust under ч.4 ст.159 of the Criminal Code and on two counts of misappropriation under ч.2 ст.160. The court found that, in a shop, abusing a trust founded on their personal acquaintance and knowing the victim had family problems, she told her falsely that a curse had been placed on her and offered to resolve those problems by removing it and performing a cleansing rite on the victim's jewellery, while knowing she had no such ability and no intention of doing so. Under that pretext she received the victim's jewellery collection — itemised in the judgment piece by piece, including gold set with emeralds, sapphires, diamonds, topaz, rubies, tourmalines and chrysoprase, individual items ranging from roughly 15,000 to 120,850 roubles — totalling 3,973,389 roubles. On two further occasions she misappropriated sums of 100,000 and 160,000 roubles entrusted to her by the same victim. She received four years on the fraud count and two years on each misappropriation count, aggregated by partial addition under ч.3 ст.69 to five years' deprivation of liberty, suspended under ст.73 with a five-year probationary period and obligations including registration, notification of any change of residence or employment, and remaining in employment throughout. She was ordered to pay the victim 4,062,627 roubles in compensation.

Documented coercion mechanisms

• an existing personal acquaintance, which the court treated as the basis of the abuse of trust — «злоупотребляя доверием... основанном на их личном знакомстве»
• knowledge of the victim's family difficulties, which the court found the defendant had and used in framing the offer
• the curse presented as the cause of those difficulties, and its removal as the remedy for them
• the rite defined as a cleansing OF THE JEWELLERY itself, so that handing over the entire collection was a step in the procedure rather than a payment
• a continuing relationship after the handover, in the course of which two further sums entrusted to her were converted